Feast day: January 6

St. André Bessette

Religious Brother · 1845–1937

Patron of The sick, doorkeepers

A frail, barely literate Holy Cross brother in Montreal who served as a doorman for 40 years — and became one of the most famous healers in North America.

Alfred Bessette was born in 1845 near Montreal, one of a dozen children in a poor Quebec family, and orphaned by the age of twelve. Sickly all his life, with a stomach so weak he could barely eat, and never able to read or write more than a little, he drifted through hard manual jobs in Canada and the mills of New England, seemingly destined for an obscure and difficult life.

Drawn to the religious life, he applied to the Congregation of Holy Cross and was accepted only hesitantly, for he seemed to have nothing to offer; his parish priest is said to have sent him with the note, 'I am sending you a saint.' Given the name Brother André, he was assigned the humblest of tasks — doorkeeper at a college in Montreal — a post he held for some forty years. 'When I joined the community,' he later joked, 'they showed me the door, and I stayed there forty years.'

At that door, a great work began. Brother André had a deep, simple devotion to St. Joseph, and to the sick and troubled who came to the college he would speak of Joseph, rub them with oil from the lamp before Joseph's statue, and urge them to pray. Cures and conversions followed in such numbers that he became known as the 'Miracle Man of Montreal,' though he always insisted it was Joseph and God who healed, never himself.

Longing to honor St. Joseph, he began with a tiny chapel on the slope of Mount Royal and dreamed of something far greater; the immense Saint Joseph's Oratory that crowns the mountain today grew from his faith and the offerings of those he helped. He died in 1937 at ninety-one, and a million people filed past his coffin. The humble porter was canonized in 2010.

A million people filed past his casket in 1937. His job title his whole life: doorman.

“It is with the smallest brushes that the artist paints the most beautiful pictures.”
— St. André Bessette

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.