Marvels of SAINT JOSEPH (1)

At the Oratory of Saint Joseph of Mont-Royal, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Almost empty and silent, the crypt of the Oratory is nevertheless surrounded by animation and life. Many pilgrims, on the roof, contemplate the beautiful landscape to the north, to the Laurentines. Others walk slowly on the forecourt, sit on the benches placed here and there, or go to greet St. Joseph in the tiny chapel that was first erected on the mountain and which is preserved with pious care.

Most of the pilgrims, however, are neither on the roof of the crypt nor walking around; they crowd into a room of some twenty-five square feet adjoining the Oratory's restaurant and surround a small old man with a hairless face, deeply carved by wrinkles. It is the good old Brother André, the great friend of St. Joseph, the man of our time and our country, perhaps of all countries and all times, who promoted the most the devotion to St Joseph, the Head of the Holy Family.

The crowd, which is usually very dense, consists mainly, but by no means exclusively, of women and children. All of them, except a few American tourists and a few Protestant or Jewish visitors - easily recognizable among the true pilgrims - are here begging for some spiritual or temporal favor.

The Founder of the Oratory, Brother André, C.S.C, is standing behind a small table on which he often leans, crushed by fatigue. He is thin and looks frail in his somewhat faded cassock. And the stream of supplicants flows before him for hours, some asking a favor for themselves, others for their beloved ones; in their confidences flows the full range of human physical sufferings and moral failings.

The cripple and the sick are numerous. Here, in the midst of a small group of women, is a little girl who is continuously shaken by epilepsy. Here is a blind man who hides as he can behind thick dark glasses his extinct eye sockets which look like scars. Here are paralytics - who of an arm, who of a leg, - deaf people, dyspeptics with skeletal thinness, and so on… To each one of them, Brother André repeats in a tone which is inevitably monotonous and which sounds like a lesson recited by heart: “Rub yourself with the oil and a medal of St. Joseph. Pray a novena to St. Joseph, pray to Him a lot.”

The remedy is very simple and is the same for all. We are not here in a dispensary, but at the door of the sanctuary of a great saint. And the long stream of people, stopped for an instant, moves on again, and stops again for a short while, and then resumes immediately afterwards.

But this time the pause is unusually prolonged, the soft buzzing of the low voice conversations stops suddenly. In front of the small table, on two crutches, stands a young man with apparently dead or at least helpless legs. He moreover suffers of a deformed spine. Brother André had given him the same recommendation as to the other pilgrims and the beginning of their conversation got lost in the general inattention. But now, what fixes this attention, what instantly brings in this room a silence which could not be deeper if there were nobody, is that, undoubtedly on the command of Brother André, the cripple has grasped his crutches with only one hand and, and without leaning on them, takes a few hesitant steps on his legs obviously unaccustomed to walking. “Well, said then Brother André in a clear voice, now go and bring your crutches to Saint Joseph”.

And the young man, docile but still not daring to believe his good fortune, his legs shaking because of his doubts or out of weakness, we do not know, goes to the Oratory dragging with his right hand his now-useless crutches. A friend or relative accompanies him, but without helping him, and so the young man crosses the rather long and uneven path of two staircases, which separates the restaurant from the crypt-church.

A sacred shudder passes over the audience: the shadow of the Infinite Power has just manifested itself…

(I witnessed the extraordinary scene I have just described so imperfectly. I don't know what happened to the cripple and whether his recovery persisted. When I left the Oratory, late in the afternoon, he was still walking around with an unsteady gait, not daring to take his crutches back and leave them with St. Joseph, as Brother André had ordered him to do. He had been walking around already for almost two hours on legs which previously could not bear him).