by Eric Reguly
The event promises to be a festival of colour and ceremony, with tens of thousands of visitors, many of them politicians, ambassadors and senior Roman Catholic Church officials from the countries that claim the new saints.
André is a superstar in Quebec. When he died at age 91 of old age - there is no medical record of a fatal disease - on Jan. 6, 1937, a million people filed by his coffin, the equivalent to one in three Quebec residents at the time. "For Montreal, his canonization is a great drawing card," said Anne Leahy, Canada's ambassador to the Holy See in Rome. "People in Quebec are proud of Frère André just like they are proud of Maurice Richard."
André's body, placed in the Crypt Church, below the present day basilica, was a sight to behold. Piled against the walls were hundreds of crutches that had been owned by cripples allegedly cured by André. He is associated with an extraordinary 125,000 miracles, though he never considered himself a healer. Instead, he urged the unwell to see a doctor or pray.
André's first Vatican-confirmed miracle was the healing in 1958 of a Quebec man, Giuseppe Carlo Audino, who suffered from cancer. He prayed to André and the cancer disappeared. This miracle was cited in André's beatification by John Paul II in 1982.
André saw himself as a simple man, incapable of miracles "I am nothing," he would say, "only a tool in the hands of Providence, a lowly instrument at the service of St. Joseph."
André was born Alfred Bessette, one of ten children, in a town about 40 kilometres southeast of Montreal in 1845. He had a miserable upbringing. He was only nine when his father was killed by a falling tree. Three years later his mother died of tuberculosis. André was small and sickly, had little schooling and was largely illiterate. He never wrote a full sentence in his life, making the research into his career, his spirituality and his miracles reliant on the observations of friends, fellow brothers, eyewitnesses and biographers.
After his parents died, he bounced from family to family, job to job and worked as a farm hand, tinsmith, blacksmith, baker, shoemaker, coachman and, four years, in textiles mills in the United States. He returned in 1867, the year of Canadian confederation, and presented himself in 1870 to the Congregation of Holy Cross in Montreal, where he was given the name Brother André and a low-exertion job as porter at Notre-Dame College.
He doubled up as a floor washer and barber, and the sacks of coins he saved over the years from his five-cent-a-pop haircuts would later be used to finance the building of a chapel on Montreal's Mont Royal. The chapel, which still exists, is next to the larger Crypt Church that was completed under André's watch in 1917. The basilica, which was started in 1924 and not completed until 30 years after André's death, sits atop the Crypt Church. Dedicated to St. Joseph and inspired by André, the basilica's 97-metre-high dome is the world's third largest of its kind.
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Saint-Joseph’s Oratory invites Web surfers to experience Brother André’s canonization live on dedicated Twitter and Facebook accounts. These sharing and discussion sites, found respectively at twitter.com/frere_andre and facebook.com/saintfrereAndre, will be regularly updated with photos, clips, videos and testimonials. During the weekend of October 16 and 17, live news from the canonization event in Rome will also be featured. Those wishing to join the discussions on Twitter are invited to use the #frere_andre hashtag. The Salt & Light network’s blog (www.saltandlighttv.org/blog/brotherandre) will also offer a rich source of information, as well as opportunities for sharing, on all activities surrounding the celebrations of Brother André’s canonization.
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Sources include
http://www.ewtn.com/library/mary/broandre.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Bessette
http://www.holycrosscongregation.org/
http://www.saint-joseph.org/en_1123_index.php
http://www.saint-joseph.org/en_1200_index.php
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