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  IDEAS & IDEALS

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  When the tour guide told us on the bus that we were going to see one of the most famous Catholic churches in North America during my Canadian trip last summer, I was not very excited. As a non-Christian I thought I had already seen enough of them. The weather was hot and the church stood far up there on the top of a fairly high mountain. But I didn't have the nerve to be left alone on the bus. Leaving the bus unwillingly, I said to myself that I would be the first to be aboard the waiting bus after taking a cursory look at the church.

     But I was mistaken in my presumption of the church I was to visit. In outward appearance, St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, Canada, is a typical Italian Renaissance-style basilica, the huge dome of which is the second largest in the world after St. Peter’s in Rome. And it is one of the most visited shrines, over 2 million pilgrims annually. But it was not the size of the dome nor the number of the visitors that made me linger in the church far behind the allotted time making everyone on the bus mad waiting for me.

     Inside the church I could see hundreds of, no, thousands of wooden crutches piled up against the walls to the ceiling, here and there, and my curiosity turned into wonder to learn that they had been left behind by the people who were cured by Brother Andre. The number of crutches was a testimony to the miraculous cures done by him. And this was not a story in the Bible. This was why I felt compelled now to tell you this story here once more. There is no harm to hear a good story told twice, or even many times.

     Then, who is Brother Andre? He was born in 1845 in a tiny village near Montreal, the eighth of twelve children. From the moment of his birth he was so ill and weak that his poverty-stricken parents baptized him immediately on the spot of his birth, christening him Alfred. His father was a wheelwright by trade. If his mother had not exercised special care for Alfred, he probably would never have survived his childhood.

     When Alfred was 9, his father was killed in an accident in the forest. His mother was determined to keep her children together, but the effort proved too taxing for her. She contracted tuberculosis and she was forced to parcel off her children among her relatives. The only one she kept was Alfred. She knew he was practically of no use to others. His mother struggled, but the disease claimed her too, when she was 43 and Alfred 12. He was truly left alone in the world.

     As a boy, Alfred tried his hand at various trades but failed because of his poor health. Alfred, however, inherited his father’s great devotion to St. Joseph, father of Jesus, and put himself under the saint’s special protection. "My father," he would say, "was a carpenter like St. Joseph was. Surely, St. Joseph will help find me a job."

     When Alfred was 22, Father Andre Provencal, his parish pastor, who had known and loved Alfred from when he was just a baby, advised him to join the Holy Cross Brothers in Montreal. "But Father," objected Alfred, "I can neither read nor write!" The pastor said, "No matter. You know but how to pray!" In the letter of recommendation to the order the pastor wrote: "I am sending you a saint."

     At 25, Alfred became a member of the Holy Cross Brothers, and changed his name to Andre after the pastor. He was appointed the porter of Notre Dame College established by the order, and he worked as a porter for 40 years. In his porter’s office, Andre had always kept a small statue of St. Joseph on the sill of the window that looked out on Mt. Royal. "Some day St. Joseph is going to be honored in a very special way on Mt. Royal," he often said.

     He had been a porter for about five years when his extraordinary powers began to manifest themselves. One day he visited a boy who lay ill with a severe fever in the infirmary. "Get up, you lazy fellow," he ordered. "Go outside and play." The young man, feeling much better, got out of bed and went out into the playground. College authorities summoned Andre and remonstrated with them. “Please let a doctor examine him,” Andre requested. “You will see that St. Joseph cured him.” The doctor came and, after careful examination of the boy, pronounced him perfectly well. From then on, Andre’s miraculous cures continued to happen one after another.

     Reports of Andre’s healing powers brought more and more sick people to Notre Dame College. A trickle of early visitors soon grew into a flood. Parents of the students became uneasy at the presence of so many seriously ill near their sons. Andre’s superiors were suspicious. Medical doctors openly charged him with quackery. They ordered him not to receive the sick any longer. Andre obeyed. But the sick did not. They kept coming. His superiors had once seriously considered transferring Andre to another place far from Montreal.

     It was St. Joseph, indeed, who finally resolved the dilemma. Andre earned permission to build a small oratory in honor of St. Joseph on the mountain slope of Mt. Royal. "We will be able to receive the sick up there," Brother Andre promised. Andre spent eight to 10 hours each day in his office, receiving thirty to forty people an hour. Some were cured but many were not. But all felt better for having met him. The daily encounter with so much human suffering deeply affected the frail but sensitive Andre. Often tears welled in his eyes and flowed down his cheeks.

     Andre had a final dream to build a fitting shrine for St. Joseph on the top of Mt. Royal. The work undertaken eventually proved huge and expensive, but Andre was always optimistic. "I will not see the completion of the oratory," he often said, "but the work will be done. It’s not my project anyway. It’s St. Joseph’s."

     The project was stalled for several years for lack of funds. In 1936, a year before
Andre’s death, Holy Cross authorities called a meeting to decide whether to complete or abandon it. Andre was there. He meekly said, "Put a statue of St. Joseph in the middle of the building. If he wants a roof over his head, he will get it." They did. Two months later they had enough money to resume the construction.

     The following year Andre had a stroke and soon lapsed into a coma. Hospital authorities permitted the sick to enter his room. One by one they came - the last procession of suffering - to touch the old hands that had healed so many. He died at the age of 92. "It is with the smallest brushes," Andre loved to note, "that the artist paints the most exquisitely beautiful pictures." With those simple words, Andre summed up the story of his own life.

     As he had said, the church was completed as it stands today in 1967, 30 years after his death. He was elevated to sainthood by Pope John Paul II in 1982.
                                                                                                  (January 29,2004)

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