On the morning of the thirteenth of January, 1937, more than one million people stood in line in the Canadian winter outside the Saint Joseph's Oratory on Mount Royal in Montreal to file past the open coffin of a 91-year-old illiterate French-Canadian Catholic lay brother. He had been the doorkeeper of a small Catholic college for fifty-six years. He had reportedly cured thousands of the sick.

He was born on the ninth of August, 1845, in Saint-Grégoire-d'Iberville south of Montreal, eighth of twelve children. His father was killed in a lumbering accident when he was nine. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was twelve. He never learned to read or write. He worked as a farmhand, shoemaker, baker, and textile-mill labourer. At twenty-five he applied to enter the Catholic Congregation of Holy Cross at Notre-Dame College in Montreal. The Congregation rejected him for frail health. He was readmitted on the strength of a one-sentence letter from his parish priest Father André Provençal. The letter, preserved in the archives, said: 'I am sending you a saint.'

His name in religious life was Brother André. He was given the position of doorkeeper at Notre-Dame College and remained at it for the next forty years. He answered the bell. He swept the floors. He cut the boys' hair. He rubbed sick visitors with a few drops of olive oil from a lamp burning before a small statue of Saint Joseph in the college chapel. They began to be cured.

Word of the cures spread through the Catholic diocese of Montreal in the 1880s and 1890s. By 1900, Notre-Dame College could no longer manage the volume of pilgrims at the door. The Archdiocese permitted Brother André to build a small wooden chapel dedicated to Saint Joseph on the slope of Mount Royal across the road. It was built in 1904 for two hundred dollars in donations. Pilgrims came from across Canada and the eastern United States. They left their crutches, canes, prosthetic limbs, and leg braces inside.

The crutches and prosthetic limbs are still hung today on the walls of the Memorial Room of the Saint Joseph's Oratory of Mount Royal, the basilica built around Brother André's small wooden chapel. The Oratory is crowned with the third-largest church dome in the world. The Catholic Church beatified Brother André in 1982 and canonised him in 2010. He never claimed any cure. He always said: it is Saint Joseph who heals.

The Saint Joseph's Oratory receives two million pilgrims a year. You can fly to Montreal and walk into the Memorial Room.

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