St. André Bessette

A Frail Orphan Finds Holy Cross

St. André Bessette was born Alfred Bessette on August 9, 1845, at Saint-Grégoire d'Iberville, Quebec, one of twelve children in a poor family. Orphaned by the age of twelve, frail in health, and with almost no formal schooling, he drifted through years of hard labor on farms and in the textile mills of New England before returning to Canada. In 1870 his pastor commended him to the Congregation of Holy Cross with the note that he was sending them a saint. Received into the congregation, Alfred took the name Brother André and, after initial hesitation over his health, was admitted to final vows.

Doorkeeper and Healings Through St. Joseph

For some forty years Brother André served as porter at Collège Notre-Dame in Montreal — doorkeeper, sacristan, barber, messenger, and errand-runner. At the door of the college he met the poor, the troubled, and the sick, and he received them all with a word of welcome and a summons to confidence in God. He urged everyone to pray to St. Joseph, to whom he had an unshakable devotion, and would rub the sick with oil from a lamp burning before St. Joseph's altar. Reports of healings multiplied into the thousands, and crowds began to seek him out. He steadfastly refused any credit, insisting that he was only St. Joseph's 'little dog' and that it was God who healed.

Saint Joseph's Oratory and His Death

Brother André dreamed of a shrine to St. Joseph on Mount Royal, across from the college. In 1904, with a few hundred dollars saved from haircuts and small donations, he built a modest wooden chapel. It grew steadily into Saint Joseph's Oratory of Mount Royal, today the largest shrine in the world dedicated to St. Joseph, visited by some two million pilgrims each year. When Brother André died on January 6, 1937, at the age of ninety-one, an estimated one million people filed past his coffin in the winter cold.

First Canadian-Born Man Canonized

He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1982 and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on October 17, 2010, becoming the first Canadian-born man to be declared a saint. His tomb is venerated at Saint Joseph's Oratory, where his heart is also preserved as a relic. His memorial is kept on January 6 in the United States (January 7 in Canada), and he is remembered as a patron of the sick and a model of humble, hidden holiness and devotion to St. Joseph.

Significance

With little schooling and fragile health, a college doorkeeper became a source of comfort for thousands who came to him in sickness and trouble. Brother André never claimed any power of his own, pointing every visitor toward trust in God and the prayers of St. Joseph. The great shrine on Mount Royal that grew from his small wooden chapel shows how humble faithfulness, offered day after day, can bear fruit far beyond what its servant imagines.