Saint Joseph's Oratory of Mount Royal

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1904 a small lay brother of the Congregation of Holy Cross, a college doorkeeper named Brother André, built a little chapel to Saint Joseph on the slope of Mount Royal. The sick came to him, healings multiplied, and the doorkeeper, who insisted every grace came from Saint Joseph and none from himself, watched his chapel grow into Canada's largest church, crowned with one of the largest domes in the world and finished in 1967, thirty years after his death. A wall of crutches left by the healed still testifies near his tomb, pilgrims still climb the ninety-nine wooden steps on their knees, and two million visitors a year look out from the mountain over Montreal. Brother André was canonized in 2010, the humble porter of the great door.