The Doorkeeper Who Built a Mountain

I did not choose a strong instrument in Alfred Bessette, and I want that stated plainly before anything else, because the temptation with a saint this beloved is to smooth over how unlikely he was. He was the eighth of twelve children born to a poor Quebec carpenter and his wife, both of whom he lost by age twelve. He was sickly from infancy, plagued for his entire life by a weak stomach he could barely keep food in, and so poorly educated that he never learned to write more than his name with any fluency. He worked as a farmhand, a baker, a blacksmith's helper, a shoemaker, drifting between jobs in Quebec and the mill towns of New England for years before a parish priest, recognizing something in him that his resume could not show, wrote on his recommendation letter to the Congregation of Holy Cross: I am sending you a saint. I do not need impressive men to build impressive things. I need available ones, and Alfred, who took the name André in religion, was relentlessly available.

The Congregation, uncertain what to do with a novice this frail, nearly dismissed him for poor health before his profession in 1872. Instead they gave him the lowest post available at Notre Dame College in Montreal: doorkeeper. For roughly forty years he answered that door — greeting visitors, running errands, sweeping steps, cutting hair for the students, a position with so little standing that he joked, near the end of his life, that his superiors had shown him the door on his first day and he had stayed there for four decades. I want it understood that I chose that post for him deliberately. A doorkeeper meets everyone. Every sick, desperate, hopeless person who came looking for help at that college passed first through Brother André's hands, and I built, through that single unremarkable job, one of the great channels of healing of the modern Church.

He had a devotion to Joseph the carpenter that went back to his own childhood, and he never once, in the thousands of healings later attributed to his prayer, let anyone credit him for them. He rubbed the sick with oil from a lamp burning before a small statue of Joseph he kept near the door, or simply prayed with them, and told every one of them the same thing: it is not I who heal you, it is St. Joseph. I let that humility be exactly true. I worked those healings through Joseph's intercession because André asked Me to, insistently, for fifty years, never taking a cent for it, never claiming a gift beyond ordinary faith. Physicians of Montreal, initially skeptical and at times openly hostile to what they considered a dangerous popular superstition growing around an uneducated monk, nonetheless documented case after case of recoveries from conditions that had not responded to treatment.

By 1904 the crowds coming to him had grown large enough that his superiors permitted him to build a small wooden chapel on the slope of Mount Royal, across from the college, to house his growing devotion to Joseph and give the pilgrims somewhere to pray that was not simply the doorway of a school. I let that first chapel, modest as a toolshed, become the seed of St. Joseph's Oratory, and I let the fundraising for its far larger successor come, deliberately, in small coins from the poor rather than large gifts from the wealthy, because Brother André insisted Joseph, a poor workman himself, would want it built that way. By the time of André's death the great domed basilica was already rising on the mountain above the city, unfinished, and it would not be completed for decades more — he did not live to see the roof close over the church he had begun.

He died on January 6, 1937, at ninety-one, and I let Montreal show what forty years behind a door had actually built: over a million people, in bitter winter cold, filed past his coffin over the course of a week, the largest funeral procession the city had ever seen for anyone, prince or pauper. The doorkeeper who owned almost nothing had, without ever intending to, opened the door to the largest shrine of St. Joseph on earth.

The Record

Alfred Bessette was born August 9, 1845, in Saint-Grégoire-d'Iberville, Quebec, and orphaned by age twelve. He entered the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1870, taking the religious name André, and was professed in 1872 despite chronic poor health. He served for decades as doorkeeper of Notre Dame College in Montreal, where he became known for healings he attributed entirely to the intercession of St. Joseph.

In 1904, with permission from his superiors, he built a small chapel dedicated to St. Joseph on Mount Royal across from the college; this grew, through decades of fundraising drawn largely from small donations, into St. Joseph's Oratory of Mount Royal, now the largest church in Canada and the largest shrine dedicated to St. Joseph in the world. Construction of the basilica's dome was not completed until 1967, thirty years after his death.

André Bessette died January 6, 1937, in Montreal; an estimated one million people are recorded as having filed past his body during the week following his death. He was beatified on May 23, 1982, by Pope John Paul II, and canonized on October 17, 2010, by Pope Benedict XVI. His heart is preserved in a reliquary at St. Joseph's Oratory. Feast day: January 6 (celebrated January 7 in some regions).