Saint Joseph's Oratory

Saint André Bessette, who is no longer Brother André

The Oratory exists because of one man, and accounts written before 2010 give him the wrong name. Alfred Bessette, who took the name André on joining the Congregation of Holy Cross, was canonised on 17 October 2010 by Benedict XVI, having been beatified in 1982. He is Saint André Bessette, or Saint André of Montreal. He was a lay brother and never a priest, so the Oratory's own usage, Saint Brother André, is also correct — but plain "Brother André" now reads as several decades out of date.

He spent years as the doorkeeper at a college on the far side of the mountain. Visitors who came to the door with ailments were told to pray to Saint Joseph and to rub themselves with oil from the lamp that burned before his statue, and a great many of them reported being cured. Whether anything medical occurred is not a question a travel page can settle; what is beyond dispute is that people came in such numbers that a chapel had to be built to hold them, and then a larger one, and finally this.

Older accounts describe his reputation as a myth and his visitors as the crippled. Neither phrasing belongs in a description of a working shrine where people still arrive on crutches.

His preserved heart is kept in a reliquary at the centre of the exhibition on his life, inside the building. It was stolen in March 1973 and recovered intact some twenty-one months later. His tomb is below the main chapel.

The building

The small wooden chapel of 1904 still stands on the site and can be visited. The basilica above it was begun in 1924 and not finished until 1967, thirty years after Bessette's death. It was raised to the rank of minor basilica in 1955 and is a National Historic Site of Canada.

• The dome rises about 97 metres above the floor of the nave, with an external diameter of some 39 metres. It is the largest church dome in Canada. Older accounts call it the second largest in the world after St Peter's, which is not true on any measure — the claim is repeated widely and collapses as soon as Florence, the Pantheon or Yamoussoukro are put beside it. The defensible superlatives are Canadian ones.
• The basilica seats about two thousand. Accounts giving ten thousand are out by a factor of five; the figure may have come from the ten thousand votive candles in the votive chapel, which is a different thing entirely.
• The crypt church below holds a further thousand or so, and is where services are held in winter.
• The votive chapel holds the banks of candles and the crutches left behind by people who believed themselves healed. It is the part of the building visitors tend to remember.
• The interior is deliberately austere, in stark contrast to Notre-Dame Basilica down in the old city. Anyone expecting the same richness will be surprised; the scale is the effect here, not the decoration.

The steps

There are 283 steps from Queen Mary Road up to the portico — concrete, not stone, whatever older accounts say. The central flight of 99 wooden steps is reserved for pilgrims who climb it on their knees, praying on each one, and they still do, in numbers, through the summer.

Visitors not making that ascent should use the side flights and leave the wooden stairs to those who are. There is also a lift inside the building for anyone who cannot manage the climb at all, which the shrine would rather people used than struggled.

What is still being built

The Oratory has been in the middle of a long modernisation since 2018, and the state of it changes.

• The new welcome pavilion opened in February 2025, with visitor facilities and a plaza on its roof, and the carillon was enlarged at the same time.
• The dome observatory and the reorganised museum have not opened. The plan puts an exhibition walkway inside the dome and a viewing level in the lantern, but that phase is scheduled for the latter part of this decade. Anyone arriving expecting to go up inside the dome will be disappointed — and earlier target dates for this work have already slipped more than once.

Because the work is live, the shrine's own published opening times have at points lagged behind reality. It is worth confirming directly before travelling across the city, particularly for the museum.

Position

The Oratory is at 3800 Queen Mary Road. The nearest Metro stations are Côte-des-Neiges and Snowdon, both on the blue line, with the building roughly between them; buses 51, 165 and 166 all pass it. It sits on the opposite flank of the mountain from the park, so it is not a short walk from the lookout — the two are best treated as separate outings. General practicalities for the city are on the Montreal page.