Alfred Bessette took the name Brother André when he entered the Congregation of Holy Cross in Montreal in 1870 at the age of twenty-five — admitted reluctantly by superiors who doubted he could last, given his fragile health and near-illiteracy. He suffered from chronic stomach trouble that left him unable to eat solid food, and had no theological or medical training. He was assigned as porter at Notre-Dame College, where he spent forty years opening the door. He had a fierce personal devotion to St. Joseph, and sick people began coming to the college door asking for him in the 1880s.
He always deflected: 'I am only the little dog of St. Joseph.' He poured oil from the votive lamp burning before the college's statue of St. Joseph into small bottles, gave them to the sick, told them to anoint themselves while invoking St. Joseph, and made no promises. By the 1890s a steady stream of cures — of paralysis, blindness, chronic illness — was being attributed to his intercession; by 1900 thousands of pilgrims a year were appearing at the college door, leaving crutches behind as they walked back down.
In 1904 the bishop, concerned by the volume and confusion, gave Brother André permission to build a small wooden chapel on the slope of Mount Royal opposite the college and direct the pilgrims there. The chapel was the size of a tool shed. Donations arrived; Brother André expanded it. By his death in 1937 the chapel had grown into a vast pilgrimage site — over a million people processed past his coffin during the funeral week — and Saint Joseph's Oratory, completed on its foundations in the 1960s, is the largest church in Canada and one of the great Catholic pilgrimage centres of North America, drawing some two million pilgrims a year.
The diocesan tribunal that gathered evidence for his cause documented thousands of healings between 1904 and 1937. The votive chapel of the Oratory today holds nearly two thousand abandoned crutches, braces, prosthetics and orthotic appliances, organised along the walls, and the collection grows yearly; the St. Joseph's oil is still made at the Oratory and given to pilgrims who ask for it. Brother André was beatified by John Paul II in 1982. The miracle accepted for his canonisation was the 1999 recovery of a nine-year-old Quebec boy struck by a car while cycling, left with massive cranial trauma in what doctors judged an irreversible coma; his family invoked Brother André, he emerged from the coma, and several independent doctors judged the recovery inexplicable. Benedict XVI approved the miracle on 19 December 2009 and canonised him on 17 October 2010 — the first male saint born in Canada.