St. André Bessette

Who they were

André was orphaned young, frail all his life, and so uneducated that the Holy Cross brothers nearly refused him; the superior who accepted him wrote, "I am sending you a saint." They made him doorkeeper of their college in Montreal, and he stayed at the door for forty years. The sick started coming to him there, and kept coming, by the end, tens of thousands a year, and healings were reported in numbers that embarrassed him. He deflected every one: he rubbed the sick with oil from a lamp burning before St. Joseph and told them to ask Joseph, not him. "I am nothing," he said, "only a tool." His devotion built St. Joseph's Oratory, the great dome above Montreal, largely from dimes. A million people filed past his coffin in 1937. He was canonized in 2010.

Why people turn to St. André Bessette

The most recent of the great healing figures, and the least dramatic: a doorman with an oil lamp who insisted on pointing past himself. People with long illnesses, and the family members caring for them, have adopted him.

How to ask their intercession

He would tell you to ask St. Joseph, so do both. Simple words; he distrusted elaborate ones. ---