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The saints

St. André Bessette

A sickly, barely literate doorkeeper whose devotion to St. Joseph built a basilica.

Feast: 6 January (feast on the U.S. calendar) · 1845 to 1937 · The modern era · Montreal, Canada

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Black-and-white photograph of St. André Bessette, white-haired, seated in a dark cassock.

Frère Denis, c.s.c., 1920. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Home / The saints / St. André Bessette

Collège Notre-Dame, Montreal

Alfred Bessette was an orphan, frail and barely able to read.1

The Holy Cross brothers almost didn’t accept him; his pastor wrote that he was sending them a saint.1

They made him doorkeeper of their school, and he held that job for forty years.

Patronage No official patronage we can cite yet. The Church remembers him as the doorkeeper of Montreal and founder of St. Joseph’s Oratory.

01St. André Bessette

The saint of the door

He prayed with the sick who came to the door and rubbed them with oil from a lamp before St. Joseph, and many reported healings.1

He always said it was St. Joseph, not him, and the huge Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal began with his little chapel.1

Live it this week

Pray with whoever comes to your door

André prayed with every visitor at the door. This week, offer to pray with one person who tells you a problem, right then, briefly, out loud.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint André Bessette”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.