Saint Joseph's Oratory of Mount Royal

1. What Saint Joseph's Oratory Is

Saint Joseph's Oratory of Mount Royal is a Catholic shrine on the northwest slope of Mount Royal in Montreal, Quebec, dedicated to St Joseph and built around the small wooden chapel that Brother André Bessette had put up there in 1904. It is the largest church in Canada, a minor basilica since 1955, and the burial place of St André, who was canonised in 2010. The complex holds a crypt church, a votive chapel lined with candles and abandoned crutches, the original chapel preserved intact, a museum, gardens with a monumental Way of the Cross, and a great domed basilica reached by 283 steps from the road.

The Oratory is described as the largest church in Canada by the sanctuary itself and in the Government of Canada's heritage designation of the site. The count of 283 steps is also the sanctuary's own.

The French name is Oratoire Saint-Joseph du Mont-Royal. An oratory, in Catholic usage, is a place of prayer set aside for a particular purpose, and the word fits the origin here: a shed on a hillside where one brother went to pray to St Joseph and where other people started joining him. The building visible from most of Montreal today is the answer given by several generations of donors to that one man's persistence.

The shrine is run by the Congregation of Holy Cross, the religious congregation Brother André belonged to, founded in France by Blessed Basile Moreau and established in Canada in the 1840s. The Oratory is a national shrine of St Joseph, who has been honoured as a patron of Canada since the seventeenth century and was declared patron of the universal Church by Pope Pius IX in 1870.

This page covers the shrine and its founder as the builder of it. For St Joseph himself, the man in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and the devotions that have grown around him, see the profile of St Joseph, husband of Mary, which stays with Scripture and doctrine and names no shrine.

2. Who Was Brother André Bessette?

Alfred Bessette was born on 9 August 1845 at Saint-Grégoire-d'Iberville, a village southeast of Montreal in what was then Lower Canada, the eighth child of a carpenter. His father died in a logging accident when he was nine and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was twelve. He was raised by relatives, never learned to read or write with any fluency, and had a stomach condition that left him unable to do heavy work for long. In his twenties he went south to work in the textile mills of New England, as tens of thousands of Quebeckers did in those years, and came back after a few years with no trade and no prospects.

The Porter of Collège Notre-Dame

His parish priest, André Provencal, recommended him to the Congregation of Holy Cross with a note that has become famous in the congregation: he was sending them a saint. The community accepted him in 1870 and gave him the name Brother André after that priest. His health nearly ended the matter, and the Bishop of Montreal intervened so that he could make vows. He was assigned to Collège Notre-Dame, the congregation's boys' school on Chemin Queen Mary, and made doorkeeper. He held that job for about forty years. He answered the bell, carried messages, cut the boys' hair, washed floors and windows, and was in the chapel at hours when everyone else was asleep.

He said of the assignment, in a line repeated at his beatification, that when he joined the community his superiors showed him the door and he stayed there for forty years. The joke carries the shape of his life. He was at the entrance, and the people who came to the door with troubles found him.

The Sick at the Door

From the 1870s onward, people began arriving at the college asking for Brother André. He would pray with them, rub them with oil taken from the lamp that burned before the statue of St Joseph in the college chapel, give them a St Joseph medal, and tell them to pray a novena. Reports of recoveries spread by word of mouth through the parishes of Montreal and then far beyond. During a smallpox epidemic he went to a Holy Cross college at Saint-Laurent to nurse the sick, and the outbreak there was said to have stopped.

The crowds became a problem for the school. Doctors in the city complained about him publicly. The archdiocese examined what he was doing more than once. He was consistent in his own account of it: he was a tool in the hands of Providence, the healing was St Joseph's business and not his, and he was, in his own words, only St Joseph's little dog. He asked to be left alone about it for sixty years and never varied the story.

Brother André died in Montreal on 6 January 1937, at ninety-one. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 23 May 1982 and canonised by Pope Benedict XVI on 17 October 2010, the first man born in Canada to be declared a saint. His feast is kept on 6 January, and on 7 January in Canada. For what the Church means when it canonises anyone, see the guide to the saints and why Catholics honour them.

3. The Wooden Chapel of 1904

The Oratory began as a small wooden chapel on the mountainside opposite the college, built in 1904 with permission from Archbishop Paul Bruchési of Montreal and paid for out of the coins Brother André had saved. He had wanted a chapel to St Joseph on that slope for years. The archbishop's condition was blunt and is part of the story every guide at the Oratory tells: build it, but incur no debt. The first structure was roughly the size of a garden shed, without heating, and its roof leaked.

The Nickels From Haircuts

The seed money is the detail people remember. Brother André cut the students' hair at the college for a few cents a head and put the money aside for the chapel over a period of years. Other small donations followed from people he had prayed with. The Congregation of Holy Cross owned land on the slope, bought partly to protect the college's view, and the chapel went up there.

The building was enlarged almost at once because it could not hold the people who came. A roof, a bell tower and a shelter for pilgrims were added between 1908 and 1912, and a heating system after that so it could be used through a Montreal winter. Brother André received visitors in a room beside it. The chapel of 1904 still exists, preserved inside the complex, and is described in section 9.

The verse is worth holding beside the chronology. Every stage of this shrine was built without a founding endowment, by a congregation that had very little, on donations from working people in a city that was poor for much of the period. The pauses in construction were long and the plans were cut back more than once.

4. From Crypt Church to Basilica

The Oratory grew in stages over more than sixty years, and the shape of the complex today is a record of those stages stacked up the hillside. The crypt church came first, in 1917, seating about a thousand people. Construction of the great church above it began in 1924. Work stopped during the Depression, resumed in the later 1930s, and the interior was not finished until the 1960s. Pilgrims walk through all of it in one visit, from the oldest level to the newest.

The Statue in the Unfinished Shell

The best known episode of the construction belongs to the Depression. Money ran out with the walls up and no dome, and the committee met to consider abandoning the work or roofing the shell cheaply. Brother André, by then in his eighties, told them to put a statue of St Joseph inside the unfinished building, and said that if St Joseph wanted a roof over his head he would get one. They did it. The funds came, and the dome was built. Accounts of the meeting differ in the details, and Holy Cross has repeated the substance of it consistently ever since.

Dates in the table follow the chronology published by the sanctuary and by the Congregation of Holy Cross. Where accounts of the Depression-era decision differ in wording, the substance given here is what the congregation itself has published.

Brother André did not live to see the church finished. He died in January 1937 with the dome still unbuilt, and the crowds who came to the crypt for his funeral filled the site for days in a Montreal winter.

5. The Dome and the Skyline

The dome of Saint Joseph's Oratory tops out higher above sea level than anything else on the Montreal skyline, because the church sits high on the slope of Mount Royal and the dome rises again from there. The sanctuary describes it as one of the largest church domes in the world. It was designed in its final form by Dom Paul Bellot, a French Benedictine monk and architect who had settled in Quebec, working with the Montreal architect Lucien Parent after the original designs proved too costly.

What Bellot Changed

The first design was heavier and more conventionally Beaux-Arts. Bellot's dome is a concrete structure with a simpler profile and an interior of exposed ribs, closer to the modern liturgical architecture he had built in the Netherlands and France. He was a monk of Solesmes and thought about churches as places for the liturgy first, which shows in the plainness of the interior surfaces. He died in Quebec in 1944 before the interior was completed, and Gérard Notebaert carried the work through.

Seen from the road below, the dome reads as a single gesture above a very long flight of steps. Seen from the Plateau or from the river, it is a green copper hemisphere floating over the trees of the mountain. The Oratory was recognised as a National Historic Site of Canada, a designation given by the federal government for the building's architectural and social significance.

The National Historic Site designation is made by the Government of Canada on the recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. The comparative claims about the height and the size of the dome are the sanctuary's own published description of the building.

Standing Under It

Inside, the dome is far quieter than the exterior suggests. The basilica interior is deliberately austere, in grey stone and concrete, with the eye pulled forward to the altar and the crucifix rather than up into decoration. People often say the space feels cold at first sight and then settles. The building is a shrine rather than a cathedral, so it was designed to hold a moving crowd of pilgrims and to give them somewhere to be still.

6. The 283 Steps

Three staircases run side by side up the slope from Chemin Queen Mary to the doors of the basilica, and the sanctuary's own description puts the full climb at 283 steps. The central staircase is wooden and is set aside for pilgrims who climb it on their knees, one step at a time, praying as they go. The two stone staircases on either side are for everyone walking up on foot, and there are internal escalators and lifts through the building for those who need them.

The figure of 283 steps is the count published by the sanctuary itself.

Why Anyone Climbs on Their Knees

Climbing steps on the knees is a penitential practice with a long history in Catholic shrines, the best known parallel being the Scala Santa in Rome. The logic is straightforward. Prayer is made by the whole person, body included, and a slow painful ascent puts the body into an act of sorrow for sin or of petition for somebody in trouble. People do it carrying a specific intention: a sick child, an addiction, a marriage, a death. Some pray one Our Father or one Hail Mary per step, which makes the climb take a long time.

The Church requires none of this. The practice is a devotion, freely chosen, and it earns nothing that God has not already given freely in Christ. A pilgrim who takes the lift and prays in front of the tomb has done nothing less than the one on the wooden stairs. For the wider question of what a pilgrimage is and what the Church actually attaches to it, see the guide to what a pilgrimage is in Catholic practice.

7. The Votive Chapel and the Crutches

The votive chapel is the room most visitors remember, a long low space behind the crypt church filled with tiered banks of candles burning in front of statues, and hung along one wall with crutches, canes, walking frames and braces left there by pilgrims. A large statue of St Joseph stands at the centre. The crutches are votive offerings, given in thanks by people who arrived at the Oratory needing them and believed they had been helped.

What a Votive Offering Is

A votive offering is an object left at a shrine as a public sign of thanks for a prayer the giver believes was answered, or as a token accompanying a request. The practice is ancient and appears across the Christian world, from silver hearts pinned to Italian altars to the pilgrim shells of Compostela. Leaving a crutch is a particular form of it: the pilgrim gives up the thing they no longer need and leaves it where everyone can see it.

What the crutches on that wall establish, exactly, is what those individual pilgrims said about their own recovery, and the Oratory presents them on those terms rather than as verdicts of the Church. The formal investigation of a claimed miracle is a slow, medical and canonical process, and only a small number of cases anywhere are ever taken through it. Section 13 sets out how that works.

The Candles

The banks of candles are the other half of the room. A lit candle works nothing by itself. The candle is a sign that a prayer has been made and is continuing to burn while the person who lit it goes back to their life, and the practice is as old as the lamps that Christians kept at the tombs of the martyrs in the catacombs of Rome. People light them here for the sick above all, because that is what this shrine has always been for.

Oil from the lamps burning before St Joseph is still distributed at the Oratory, as Brother André distributed it. It is a sacramental, a sign that accompanies prayer and disposes a person to receive grace. The Catechism describes sacramentals as sacred signs instituted by the Church that prepare us to receive the fruit of the sacraments and make holy various occasions in life (CCC 1667). The oil carries no power of its own, and the Oratory presents it on exactly those terms.

8. The Tomb of St André

St André Bessette is buried inside the Oratory, in a chapel on the level of the votive chapel, between the crypt church below and the basilica above. The tomb is a plain rectangular block of black stone, without effigy or ornament, carrying the words Pauper, servus et humilis, poor, servant and humble. It sits behind a low rail, and there is usually a line of people beside it with a hand flat on the stone.

The Funeral of 1937

Brother André died on 6 January 1937. His body lay in the crypt church for a week and an enormous crowd came through in a Montreal January to file past it, in numbers the newspapers of the day struggled to estimate. Reports of the crowd size vary widely between sources and are not something this page will put a figure on. What is well attested is that traffic in the city was disrupted for days and that people queued outdoors in deep cold.

Beatification and Canonisation

He was declared venerable by Pope Paul VI in 1978, beatified by Pope John Paul II on 23 May 1982, and canonised by Pope Benedict XVI in St Peter's Square on 17 October 2010. In each case the process required the examination of a reported cure that medicine could not explain, presented to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints with the medical files and assessed by its consultants. John Paul II prayed at this tomb when he visited Montreal in 1984, two years after the beatification. The guide to Pope John Paul II covers his own long record of canonisations.

What is striking about the tomb is how little of it there is. He asked for nothing during his life, refused to be photographed for years, and would not be called a healer. A black block with three Latin words underneath the largest church in the country is a fair summary of the man.

9. The Heart, the Room and the Original Chapel

Three smaller things at the Oratory are easy to walk past and are worth the detour: the reliquary containing Brother André's heart, the tiny room where he lived and received visitors, and the original wooden chapel of 1904, which was preserved rather than demolished as the complex grew around it.

The Heart

His heart was removed after his death, at the request of the Congregation of Holy Cross and with the permission required for such a thing, and is kept in a reliquary in the Oratory. The practice of preserving a saint's heart separately is old in the Catholic world and is not unique to him. The reliquary was stolen in 1973 and was recovered about twenty months later, an episode Montrealers of a certain age all remember. Veneration of relics is the honouring of a saint's body as something destined for resurrection, and the Church has always distinguished it sharply from worship, which belongs to God alone.

His Room

The room he used beside the chapel is preserved with his bed, his chair, his stove and a few personal objects. It is very small. He slept badly, spent hours of the night in prayer, and kept almost nothing. Visitors who have read about the crowds and the miracles usually find this the most sobering stop in the building, because the scale of the room and the scale of the basilica were produced by the same person.

The Chapel of 1904

The first chapel still stands, restored, with its wooden interior and the small statue of St Joseph. It has been moved and enlarged over the years and is now sheltered within the site, above the crypt. Standing in it is the fastest way to understand the whole place. A poor brother put up a shed to pray in, and the mountain above it filled with stone.

10. Inside the Basilica

The basilica is the upper church under the dome, seating a congregation in the low thousands, and its interior was completed in the 1950s and 1960s in a deliberately spare modern idiom. The main features are the great crucifix and the wooden figures of the twelve apostles by the French sculptor Henri Charlier, the stone high altar, the mosaic work in the apse on the life of St Joseph, and the mechanical-action organ built by Rudolf von Beckerath of Hamburg and installed in 1960.

The Apostles and the Altar

Charlier's apostles stand along the sanctuary in plain carved wood, elongated and still, with none of the sentimentality of nineteenth-century church statuary. The crucifix hangs above the altar in the same manner. The effect is that a very large room is held together by a small number of strong objects, which is what the architects intended when they refused a decorated interior.

The Organ and the Choir

The Beckerath organ is a large mechanical-action instrument and is used for recitals as well as for the liturgy. The Oratory also maintains Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal, a boys' choir founded in the 1950s that sings at the shrine and tours. Music does real work in a shrine of this size. Sung liturgy turns a constant flow of visitors into a congregation.

The Crypt Church Below

The crypt church of 1917 remains in daily use and is where many pilgrims actually attend Mass, because it is warmer, smaller and closer to the votive chapel. Behind its altar stands a white Carrara marble statue of St Joseph holding the child Jesus. Mass in the crypt, with the candle banks and the tomb a few steps away, is the centre of gravity of a visit. For what the Mass is and why Catholics build everything around it, see the guide to the Mass explained.

11. The Gardens and the Way of the Cross

The gardens on the hillside beside the basilica hold a monumental Way of the Cross, fourteen stations in stone set among trees and terraces on the slope of the mountain. The figures were designed by the Quebec sculptor Louis Parent and carved in stone by Ercolo Barbieri over a period of years in the middle of the twentieth century. Pilgrims walk the stations outdoors, uphill, which gives the devotion a physical dimension that an indoor set of plaques cannot.

Walking the Stations

The Way of the Cross is a devotion in which a person moves between fourteen scenes of the passion of Christ, from the condemnation before Pilate to the burial, praying at each one. It grew out of the practice of pilgrims retracing Christ's route in Jerusalem, and shrines everywhere reproduce it so that people who will never reach the Holy Land can make the same journey. Our guide to the Via Dolorosa and the stations in Jerusalem covers the original route.

At the Oratory the stations climb, and by the tenth or eleventh station on a hot day the walk itself has become part of the prayer. Groups pray them aloud together, often in French, and individuals go through in silence. The gardens are also simply a good place to sit, which matters at a shrine that can be busy.

The Museum

The Oratory keeps a museum with material on Brother André's life and on the building of the shrine, along with a substantial collection of nativity scenes from many countries, shown at Christmas. The historical material is the part worth an hour: photographs of the wooden chapel, the letters, the accounts of the crowds, and the record of a construction project that took two thirds of a century.

12. Why St Joseph, and Why Here

St Joseph is the husband of Mary and the legal father of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, a carpenter or builder of Nazareth who is given four dreams, no recorded words, and the task of protecting the child. Brother André had an unremarkable, entirely ordinary devotion to him, learned as a boy, and simply refused to let go of it. The Oratory exists because one man kept asking St Joseph for things on behalf of other people for sixty years.

Joseph in Scripture

Matthew tells of the angel who instructs Joseph in a dream to take Mary as his wife (Matthew 1:20-25), of the flight into Egypt to escape Herod (Matthew 2:13-15), and of the return to Nazareth. Luke places him at the census in Bethlehem, at the presentation in the Temple, and at the finding of the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem (Luke 2:41-52). Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55 identify Jesus by his trade and his family. Joseph never speaks in the New Testament. He is described as a righteous man who obeyed instructions he did not understand.

Patron of Canada and of the Church

St Joseph was chosen as a patron of New France in the seventeenth century, and devotion to him has been embedded in French Canadian Catholic life ever since, in place names, parish names and family names across Quebec. Pope Pius IX declared him patron of the universal Church in 1870, and Pope Pius XII added the feast of St Joseph the Worker on 1 May in 1955. His principal feast is 19 March.

Why ask a saint for anything at all is a fair question, and the Catholic answer is short. Asking a saint to pray for you is asking a member of the Church who is alive in Christ to intercede, in the same way you would ask a friend to pray for you (CCC 956, 2683). The saint is not a source of grace. Catholic teaching holds Christ as the one mediator, and intercession works within that, never beside it. The guide to prayer in the Catholic tradition works through the distinction between adoration, which belongs to God, and the honour given to the saints.

The Comparison Protestant Visitors Often Make

Protestant visitors to the Oratory frequently find the crutches and the candle banks difficult, and the objection is worth stating in its own terms rather than brushed aside. In most Protestant traditions, prayer is directed to God alone through Christ, on the grounds of 1 Timothy 2:5, that there is one mediator between God and mankind. Asking a dead person to intercede looks to them like a breach of that, and physical practices such as crawling up a staircase look like an attempt to earn favour that Scripture says is given freely. Reformed and evangelical writers have made that case consistently since the sixteenth century, and they make it out of a real concern for the sufficiency of Christ.

The Catholic reply accepts the premise and denies the conclusion. Christ is the sole mediator, the saints are alive in him and not dead in the relevant sense (Luke 20:38), and asking them to pray no more competes with Christ's mediation than asking your neighbour to pray for you does. The knees on the staircase earn nothing. They express something. Our guide to the Catholic and Protestant differences sets out both positions at length.

13. What the Church Claims About the Cures

The Catholic Church makes no blanket claim that people are healed at Saint Joseph's Oratory. What the Church has formally judged is narrower: in the causes for Brother André's beatification and canonisation, specific reported cures were examined with medical evidence and accepted as inexplicable by the science available. Everything else on that wall of crutches is testimony given by pilgrims, presented as testimony, and nothing more is asserted about it.

How a Miracle Is Actually Assessed

A claim of miraculous healing reaching a formal process is examined in stages. The medical file is gathered and reviewed by physicians, who are asked a narrow question: is this recovery explicable by the state of medical knowledge, given the diagnosis, the treatment and the course of the illness. Only if the physicians report that they cannot explain it does the theological assessment follow, asking whether the cure came in answer to prayer to the person whose cause is under examination. The bar is high and most claims do not clear it. Our guide to how the Church investigates miracles goes through the criteria in detail.

Brother André's Own Account

He gave the same answer for sixty years. He was nothing. St Joseph was the one being asked. People who were cured had been cured by God. He was uncomfortable being watched, disliked being called a wonder worker, and told visitors to go to confession, to pray, and to stop pestering him. That consistency is one of the reasons the archdiocese, which had good reason to be nervous about a popular healer inside its territory, eventually left him alone.

Sickness that is not cured is the harder half of this subject and the Oratory is full of people living in it. Catholic teaching does not promise physical healing to anyone in this life, and the sacrament of the anointing of the sick is given for strength, forgiveness and union with the passion of Christ, with bodily recovery mentioned as something that may follow if it is good for the person's salvation. The guide to why God allows suffering takes that question head on.

14. How to Pray a Visit

A visit to Saint Joseph's Oratory works best with a shape to it, because the site is large and it is easy to spend an hour photographing a dome and leave without having prayed. The natural route runs from the bottom to the top: the crypt church, the votive chapel and the candles, the tomb of St André, the original chapel and his room, then the basilica under the dome, and the gardens and the Way of the Cross on the way out.

A Simple Order

Begin in the crypt church and sit down before doing anything else. Name the intention you have brought, out loud if you can do it quietly. Go to the votive chapel and light a candle for that intention. Stand at the tomb and ask St André to pray for the person you are carrying, which is the request people have been making at this spot since 1937. Go up to the original chapel and stay a few minutes in the small room. Then go into the basilica, and stay there long enough for the noise to drop out of your head.

If Mass is being celebrated while you are there, go to it. Confession is available at most shrines of this size, and a pilgrimage is one of the classic occasions for making one after a long gap. Our guide to confession and how to make a good one covers what to do if it has been years.

If You Cannot Go

Most people reading this page will not get to Montreal. The devotion travels perfectly well, because there is nothing at the Oratory that is confined to the mountain: a novena to St Joseph, prayer for a sick person by name, an act of trust made on a bad day. Brother André told people to pray to St Joseph and go home. Our guide to making a pilgrimage without travelling gives a workable pattern, and the survey of pilgrimage sites in the United States and Canada puts the Oratory in the company of the shrines nearest to it, including the shrine of St Kateri Tekakwitha, whose story is told in the profile of St Kateri Tekakwitha.

15. Frequently Asked Questions