Tomorrow is the feast day of St. André Bessette, and since he’s such a special saint for all of us in the Congregation of Holy Cross (the community of priests and brothers who has staffed Christ the King since we were founded in 1933, and of which me, Fr. Cameron and Fr. Bob are all a part), I thought I’d take this opportunity to share the joy of this feast day with you.
St. André is the only canonized saint from our Congregation, and when you look at his life story, he seems like a pretty unlikely candidate for sainthood. Born in Canada in 1845, he was always orphaned at an early age. He was largely uneducated and always in frail health, and both of these factors made it challenging for him to find work. But he always had a strong devotion to St. Joseph, and when he was accepted into the Holy Cross Brothers, he was given the position of doorkeeper at a school in Montreal.
It was there that the miracles began to happen — countless stories of healing due to André’s intercession. It earned him such a reputation that he became a distraction to the school, and he was eventually given his own spot from which to receive visitors. It was there that his dream of a shrine to St. Joseph began to take shape. He put up a humble structure across the street from the school, and it quickly became a place for prayer and pilgrimage. It grew and grew until it evolved in the Oratory of St. Joseph, a majestic structure in the Montreal skyline that stands as the largest shrine to St. Joseph in the world. (Those of you who were on the parish pilgrimage to Montreal remember the Oratory well!) Brother André died in 1937, and his legacy lives on: tens of thousands of miraculous healings attributed to his intercession, and roughly two million pilgrims to the Oratory each year.
I love St. André’s story because he shows us all that God doesn’t necessarily choose those whom the world considers “the best and the brightest” to accomplish His will. He can take the most simple, unremarkable people among us and perform incredible works through us if we simply believe in Him and dedicate our lives to growing closer to Him each day. That gives me tremendous hope that our ordinary lives can be extraordinary in the hands of the Lord.
St. André, pray for us!
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