Pope Benedict XVI canonized the first male saint born on Canadian soil, Brother André Bessette, and urged Catholics to follow the example of the simple man who showed endless devotion to the poor and the sick.
André was canonized before 50,000 pilgrims from around the world, an estimated 5,000 of whom had made the trip from Quebec and other parts of Canada, in St. Peter's Square. The "Miracle Man of Montreal," as he is known, was one of six canonizations made Sunday morning, an event that turned the square into a sea of flags from Canada, Poland, Spain, Australia and Italy -- the countries that claimed the new saints.
In his canonization mass, the pope praised André as someone who "showed boundless charity and did everything possible to soothe the despair of those who confided in him." He noted that André "knew suffering and poverty very early in life" and "lived the beatitude of the pure of heart, that of personal rectitude."
The Pope said his life is a model for others. "May the example of Brother André inspire Canadian Christian Life," he said.
André was already a superstar in his home province. When he died at age 91 in 1937, a million people filed by his coffin at the Saint Joseph Oratory in Montreal, which he had founded in 1904. His canonization is expected to make the Oratory, and Montreal itself, an even more alluring international pilgrimage destination. "Many more people will come," said Gerald Tremblay, the Montreal mayor who attended the canonization. "Religious tourism is becoming more and more important."
St. Peter's Square had a festive feel in the two hours before the canonization ceremony officially started. The Australians, celebrating the canonization their first saint, Mary MacKillop, were particularly boisterous. They waved flagged and shouted chants that are popular at international sports events. "Aussie, Aussie, Ausssie, oye, oye, oye," was one of them.
The Canadians were almost as loud, shouting "We love Canada. We love Brother Andre." The Canadian and Quebec flags were being waved everywhere.
Some of the Canadian Catholics in the crowd said they came to express their thanks to André, whom they believed helped them in some way. "I had a sense that Brother André was looking over me," said Judy Carlin, 62, a homecare nurse from Edmonton. "He is truly a sign of hope. He interceded on behalf of the little people, the poor, the vulnerable."
André, who spent four years working odd jobs in the United States, in the 1860s, also has a strong following in some American states. Two who traveled to Rome for the event were Lynn Kujak, 58 and her sister Mary Deming, 59,both from Minnesota. They had good reason to come besides admiration for André: Their grandmother, Lucy Bessette, was a cousin of André, who was born Alfred Bessette. "We just had to be here," said Mary. "I have a very bad ankle and Lynn has a very bad knee and we expect miracles today."
André, who was known as a healer, is associated with an extraordinary 125,000 miracles. Two of the healings were investigated thoroughly by the Vatican and were judged to be medically inexplicable -- miracles, in other words. His 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. The miracle was cited in André's beatification -- the first step on the journey to sainthood -- by Pope John Paul II in 1982.
The identity of the second "miraculee," as they're known, has never been publicly revealed. What is known is he is a young Quebec man and that he was at the canonization ceremony in St. Peter's Square Sunday. The man, who is probably 19 or 20 years old, suffered massive cranial trauma in a road accident in 1999, when he was a child, and was evidently in an irreversible coma. Doctors say that recovery from serious head injuries is exceedingly rare.
The boy's family and friends prayed to André. Against all odds, the boy emerged from his coma. The recovery was judged scientifically inexplicable by several independent doctor. This second miracle qualified André for sainthood. The Vatican announced he would be canonized last February.
While many pilgrims hoped the Quebec miraculee would reveal himself, Mario Lachappelle, the Congregation of Holy Cross priest from Quebec who was André's vice-postulator (postulators sponsor and plead the canonizations), said there was always little chance that he would do so. "He and his family are humble people and they value their privacy," Father Lachappelle said.
The colourful 2 1/2-hour canonization ceremony, on a intermittently sunny morning, brought out Vatican's top ranks. On display were five cardinals, including Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, archbishop of Montreal, 10 archbishops, 13 bishops and 20 priests.
The dignitaries were seated on the right side of the stage. They included speaker of the Canadian Senate, Noel Kinsella, and foreign minister Lawrence Canon. Neither prime minister Stephen Harper nor Quebec premier Jean Charest attended the event.
Mr. Cannon was beaming after the event because he managed to snag a short visit -- less than two minutes -- with Pope Benedict. He said they spoke in French. "I encouraged him to engage in dialogue between the faiths," he told reporters. "He was very open to that.
Mr. Cannon called André's canonization "a great day for the Catholic Church, for Canada and for Quebec...He actually personifies a lot of what Canada stands for."
André was born 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.
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 in textiles mills in the United States. In 1870, three years after Canadian confederation, he presented himself 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.
André would become better known as a healer than a builder. He had an affinity for the poor and the ill and visited them everywhere. He would urge them to pray to St. Joseph or rub a medal of the saint. In time he gained the reputation as someone who could cure sickness - a miracle worker - and the people would go to him in the hundreds, then thousands. Some allegedly were cured, others died, though his friends said anyone who met him felt enriched or transformed in some way.
Fr. Lachappelle, who has spent his career studying Andre, said some of the stories of miracles were fantastic. "He would say [to a cripple] 'You're not sick, so leave you're crutches here.' And some of them just walked away," he said.
André himself declared himself 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."
Fr. Lachappelle said what interests him most about André's life is not so much the healings but his unconditional acceptances of others and his ability to speak simply about the love of God. and what he calls his "avant-garde" ecumenism. "What is fascinating about Brother André is that he was so much ahead of his time," he said. "He was a father figure, and did not have an image of God as a dispenser of justice."
André, he said, was "avant-garde" in the sense that he was unusually liberal for his time. For example, he befriended non-Catholics and non-Christians, a rarity for devout men of the Church in that era. One of his closest friends was George H. Ham, the Protestant newspaperman who published the first biography of Andre, "The Miracle Man of Montreal," in 1921.
Eric Reguly