Saint Andre Bessette

Religious

Feast Day

January 6

Life

1845–1937

Canonized

2010

Order

Congregation of Holy Cross (CSC)

Born

Saint-Gregoire d'Iberville, Quebec, Canada

Alfred Bessette was born August 9, 1845, the eighth of twelve children in a poor French-Canadian family in Saint-Gregoire d'Iberville, Quebec. Orphaned at twelve, he worked as a farmhand, baker, blacksmith, and factory worker, including periods in mill towns of New England.

In 1870 he was admitted to the Congregation of Holy Cross at Notre Dame College in Montreal and given the religious name Brother Andre. Because of his frail health and limited literacy, he was assigned the post of porter, which he held for forty years. He greeted visitors to the college, ran errands, cut hair, and visited the sick.

His personal devotion to Saint Joseph and his counsel to apply oil from the lamp burning before the saint's image at the college chapel led to many reported cures. As pilgrims multiplied, he obtained permission to build a small wooden chapel on Mount Royal in 1904. Around it grew the Oratory of Saint Joseph of Mount Royal, the basilica that he served until his death and that remains the largest church in Canada.

Brother Andre died on January 6, 1937, at age 91. Some one million people venerated his body during the week of his lying in state. He was beatified by Pope Saint John Paul II on May 23, 1982, and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in Saint Peter's Square on October 17, 2010, who in his homily called him "the faithful custodian" of the Oratory of Saint Joseph and noted that he "witnessed innumerable cures and conversions."