ST. louis church, dahisar

St. André Bessette is the first saint from the Congregation of Holy Cross, the religious community that founded the University of Notre Dame. 
Sickness and weakness dogged André from birth. He was the eighth of 12 children born to a French Canadian couple near Montreal. Adopted at 12, when both parents had died, he became a farmhand. Various trades followed: shoemaker, baker, blacksmith—all failures. He was a factory worker in the United States during the boom times of the Civil War.

At 25, André applied for entrance into the Congregation of Holy Cross. After a year’s novitiate, he was not admitted because of his weak health.

Moreover, what was an illiterate man doing asking for admission into an order of teaching brothers? Everything told the superior to reject such an applicant. But there was a note from the young man’s pastor: “I am sending you a saint….”

But at  the urging of Bishop Bourget, he was finally received. He was given the humble job of doorkeeper at Notre Dame College in Montreal, with additional duties as sacristan, laundry worker and messenger. “When I joined this community, the superiors showed me the door, and I remained 40 years,” he said.

Bro. André use to say, “It is with the smallest brushes that the artists paint the most beautiful pictures.”

In his little room near the door, he spent much of the night on his knees. On his windowsill, facing Mount Royal, was a small statue of Saint Joseph, to whom he had been devoted since childhood. When asked about it he said, “Some day, Saint Joseph is going to be honored in a very special way on Mount Royal!”

When he heard someone was ill, he visited to bring cheer and to pray with the sick person. He would rub the sick person lightly with oil taken from a lamp burning in the college chapel. Word of healing powers began to spread.

When an epidemic broke out at a nearby college, André volunteered to nurse. Not one person died. “I do not cure,” he said again and again. “Saint Joseph cures.”

Something happens when the same person answers the door for hundreds of people day in and day out, for years. They come to know him, and some come to intuit that this brother prays more than most. They begin to tell him their sufferings. He prays with the sick, asks God to heal them, and commends them to St. Joseph, whom he loves. The word begins to spread quietly through the city: That simple brother who doesn’t know how to read? God has given him the gift of healing. People at the door no longer come to see those inside; they want the porter.

The other brothers begin to grumble. He’s a fraud, some say. A danger to the order. But that is a level of complexity that Brother André cannot understand. Of course I don’t heal, he tells them. I pray to St. Joseph, and he intercedes for them with his foster Son. So many people come asking for healing that Brother André’s superiors ask him to receive visitors at the nearby trolley station. Soon, 80,000 letters arrive for him a year. In the end he needed four secretaries to handle the 80,000 letters he received each year.

To everyone to came, Brother André’s message was the same: “Go to Joseph. He will help you. Come, we’ll pray together.” In 1904, Brother André asked the Archbishop of Montreal for permission to build a small chapel to honor St. Joseph across the street from the school. You can build only what you have money for, the bishop replied. Brother André did not have any money. So he began to give haircuts, at 5 cents apiece. In a few years be had enough to build what was essentially a small roofless hut. Over many years came better walls, a roof, heating, and thousands of pilgrims – so many that plans were made for the little wooden chapel to become a basilica. To this place of miracles, where God visited the broken, those who came brought the wounds of their hearts, the sufferings of their bodies, and their faith to St. Joseph and to his friend, this simple brother who received them and helped them to pray.
When Brother André was ninety years old, he asked some of his coworkers to place a statue of St. Joseph in the unfinished church. They carried him, old and sick, up the hill so that he could see it. When he died on January 6, 1937, those hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who had come over the years came again, despite the frigid Quebec winter. They came in gratitude: in a week, one million people filed past the coffin of the illiterate brother who had accompanied them through their sorrows and sufferings, and who had been for them a kind of doorway to heaven.

For many years the Holy Cross authorities had tried to buy land on Mount Royal. Brother André and others climbed the steep hill and planted medals of Saint Joseph. Suddenly, the owners yielded. André collected $200 to build a small chapel and began receiving visitors there—smiling through long hours of listening, applying Saint Joseph’s oil. Some were cured, some not. The pile of crutches, canes and braces grew.

The chapel also grew. By 1931, there were gleaming walls, but money ran out. “Put a statue of Saint Joseph in the middle. If he wants a roof over his head, he’ll get it.” The magnificent Oratory on Mount Royal took 50 years to build. The sickly boy who could not hold a job died at 92.

St. Joseph’s Oratory, completed after Brother André’s death, still attracts over two million pilgrims a year. It is filled with crutches, notes of gratitude, prayers – the signs of Brother André’s friends then and now.

He is buried at the Oratory. He was beatified in 1982 and canonized in 2010. At his canonization in October 2010, Pope Benedict XVI said that Saint Andre “lived the beatitude of the pure of heart.”

st andre bessette canonization

 

To learn even more about Saint André Bessette, C.S.C., watch this video lecture from the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.