St. Joseph’s Oratory
Read time: 8 minutes
58 years ago, I visited The Oratory in Montreal as part of a trip I took to Expo 67. It took 7 days to get there in a school bus from Winnipeg. This time, I flew to Toronto to visit family, and I accompanied the in laws as we drove to Montreal in about 5 hours.
I was quite young when I went the first time. I remember having to climb a lot of stairs. I really could not appreciate the sheer magnitude and awesomeness of what this place represented, and how it came to be. However, the visit did have an impact on me, as there certainly was something about it that I couldn’t explain. When I grew up, I sometimes would think about making another visit, but life and circumstances just seemed to fly by.
It was not until this Jubilee year that I wanted to make a pilgrimage, somewhere. It would most certainly have to be in Canada, and I prayed about this for a long time. About a month before I suddenly decided to take the plunge. It was the Holy Spirit that, so many times before, prompted me into action: to go to Montreal.
I wasn’t disappointed. Oratory is a Latin word which means “Place of Prayer”. And that is what it is. Pilgrims from all over the world, to the tune of over 2 million a year, come to this place to be renewed, converted and healed here on Mount Royal in Montreal. Some are tourists just visiting another museum and checking it off their bucket list. Others are there for completely different reasons. They come to pray, to search for meaning, to climb the mountain and to get closer to God and to be healed. Not only in the body, but in the soul, the mind and the spirit.
Although Saint Brother Andre Bessette is the founder of St. Joseph’s Oratory, he never took any credit for any of it. He would say that all of this is a Work of God and St. Joseph. One of his biographers remarked that you could write hundreds and hundreds of pages about the Oratory and never even mention Brother Andre’s name.
First and foremost, Saint Brother Andre was a man of prayer, and the Oratory developed years before its founding in 1904, principally as a lay prayer movement. Brother Andre entered the Congregation of the Holy Cross in 1870 and because of his frail health and lack of education he was made porter (doorman), barber, janitor and infirmary attendant of Notre Dame College. He would often joke that “when I came here, I was shown the door. And I stayed there for 40 years.”
The college faced Mount Royal and the Congregation decided to purchase the property so that the beautiful view of the mountain would not be spoiled
with unwanted development.
Brother Andre always had a great devotion to St. Joseph, which he received from his mother, so he began to dream of doing something to honour him. One day when brother Andre and his Superior were both sick in the infirmary, Brother Andre asked him for permission to build a simple niche in the mountain and to place a statue of St. Joseph there that someone had given him.
He explained that he wanted to take people up there for a quiet place to pray. He would always be inviting people to pray, and he always prayed with them.
The superior was busy reading his breviary and looking over his glasses at brother Andre, he nodded his head in agreement and went back to reading his breviary. The rest as they say is history.
As porter of the college many people came through those doors. Because of his kindness, simplicity and affability, there was something about him that attracted people, and they would soon talk to him about their struggles and sufferings, because he was like one of them. As a result, many healings soon began to occur, and people began to flock to the college.
There were many trials and struggles that Brother Andre had to endure as the Oratory grew, not the least of which was from the public and even from his own community. He was mocked and humiliated. He was called a “charlatan” and the “old fool of the mountain.” But despite all of this he persevered. His favorite devotion was the Lord’s Passion. He had all 4 of the passion narratives memorized. He spent hours in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, and he would always pray the Stations of the Cross in season and out of season.
He never lived to see the completion of the Oratory. When he died at the age of 91, on January 6, 1937, in the middle of winter in Montreal, over 1 million people climbed the mountain and filed by his coffin to pay their last respects to the “Miracle Man of Montreal”.
During the process of his beatification which began soon after his death in 1940, there were close to 5000 pages of eyewitness testimony that were recorded for his cause. There were literally thousands of healings attributed to him, but he always said that “I can’t heal anyone, it is only God that heals through the intercession of St. Joseph.”
When the Oratory was finally completed in 1967, what had started as a lay prayer movement, was principally funded and built, not by the church, but by the people of God, the laity.
Brother Andre was never involved in the plans or the construction of the Oratory. He was too busy visiting the sick and praying with them and for them. From the smallest of seeds, the mustard grain, grew something beautiful for God. Saint Brother Andre was that smallest grain.
Saint Brother Andre Bessette was Canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday October 17, 2010. H was the first native born Canadian and the first religious of the Congregation of the Holy Cross to be canonized.
Saint Brother Andre Pray for us