HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BROTHER ANDRE! A MIRACLE WORKER DOUBTED BY HIS OWN FAMILY

On Saturday, August 9th, 1845, a fragile baby boy was born in a primitive cabin at the centre of a forest, 32 miles from Montreal, Canada. The cabin walls were made from blocks of wood joined with mounds of clay. A huge crucifix was the focal point of the home. 

This sickly babe looked like he hung between life and death and so the midwife baptized him conditionally, and he was named Alfred. For the rest of his life, his 9 brothers and sisters always called him Alfred, even when at the height of his fame he was known throughout the world as Brother Andre. 

He was the 6th of 10 children, born to most hard-working French Canadian parents. His father, Isaac Bessette was a carpenter who barely made enough to provide scant food for his wife and children. His mother, Clothilde took the meagre food supplies and cooked as best she could everyday for 12 hungry mouths. The children also worked as soon as they could, they took any job they could get in homes of the more prosperous people in the nearby village. The children had little time to play, and they were always trying to find work and earn an extra piastre by sweeping a yard or shoveling snow.

But the Bessettes only barely had enough to eat, and when Alfred was only 4, his father took his family to Farnham where he had secured a job as a wheelwright which paid better. Tragedy struck when Alfred was 9 and his father was wrestling with a tree that had gotten tangled in the branches of another tree. When his father finally loosed the tree, it fell on him and he was pulverized to death.

His father's untimely passing created in Alfred a longing for a father figure, and he grew to love St Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus in an intense way that was borne of grief for his real father but also a burning love for the Nazarene carpenter who had protected and nurtured the Christ Child.  While he was a seemingly ordinary child, his mother Clothilde felt there was something extraordinary in the way he knelt for prayer. Her son took after her very much, they had the same face and the same serious smile that spread in a straight line. Alfred was her favorite child, at no time was this more evident than when she was diagnosed with TB and had to go to live in a house of a relative. Her children were farmed out to other relatives, and she could take only one to live with her, and so she choose Alfred and gave the reason that he was the sickliest, but this gave rise to his siblings thinking of him as the weakling. This imposed  both a real and psychological distance between him and his siblings; he was favored by their mother but not necessarily by them. 

At 12, he saw his mother perish with the promise that, "I shall watch over you from heaven" on her lips. Perhaps she was in heaven by the time, her Alfred joined the Congregation of the Holy Cross and she may have been watching over him as he became a renowned miracle worker whose prayers to St Joseph led to the miraculous cures given myriad people. But Andre's brothers and sisters were slow to even acknowledge that he was a wonder-worker and they laughed at the mere suggestion. 

Andre became a Holy Cross brother when he was 25, but it wasn't until 42 years later when he was 67 that his siblings started to put store in his grand intercessory powers. Before that they had scoffed at the thought that "little Alfred" was a living saint. Brother Andre did not sing his own praises to his family, rather his close friend, Mrs. Mivelle was the one to encourage them to have devotion to their own brother. 

Mrs. Mivelle paid a visit to Brother Andre's sisters and she became irritated at their lack of respect. "How proud you must be to have such a brother," she said to his sisters and their families while they all sat in the parlor, "I have seen him perform the most remarkable cures." She recounted a story of one miracle - a child with an badly impaired knee had been completely cured by Andre's prayers. But instead of being proud of him, his sisters snickered and said sheepishly, "Oh, imagine Alfred performing miracles! What next?" Their laughter continued, until Mrs. Mivelle decided to break with polite etiquette and correct them, "Please don't laugh. I am telling you the absolute truth." Still they kept chuckling churlishly and treated Mrs. Mivelle as though she were telling them silly yarns. One sister decided to put Mrs. Mivelle's belief in her little brother to the test, "My legs are in a very bad condition from rheumatism and I can walk only with the greatest difficulty. If Alfred were to cure me I should believe your strange story."

One of Brother Andre's nieces had been listening and she piped up, "Mrs. Mivelle, I am engaged to a fine boy, the family likes him and the only reason they object to the marriage is because he is a Protestant. Do you think my Uncle Alfred could ask Saint Joseph to convert him?"

Mrs. Mivelle was astonished at their lack of faith in their own kin, that they wanted their own prayers answered first before they would believe. When she returned to Montreal, she hurried to Brother Andre and knowing his humility was such that he would not be hurt by his sisters' smirking at his saintliness, she relayed the conversation to him. His response was very forgiving, he did not hold it against them that they doubted him, "My sisters are very incredulous and also very bashful about asking me for help of any kind. You write them that I wish very much that they would write me and tell me all these things themselves."

Mrs. Mivelle conveyed his message and some time later, she found two letters in the mail. The sister with the bad legs had enjoyed a miraculous healing and was able to walk normally, and the niece's fiancé had converted to the Faith and they had been married in the Church. So impressed was the niece with her uncle's powerful prayers that she was planning to visit him and thank him in person. 

If you, too, would like to benefit from Brother Andre's miraculous intercession, consider praying to him on his birthday August 9th, and also offering the powerful novena to him. 

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This post was informed by Katherine Burton's Brother Andre of Mount Royal where I read the account of Andre's sisters who doubted he was a miracle-worker.