Martyrs' Tales, Angels of Gold In Montreal (original) (raw)
Travel|Martyrs' Tales, Angels of Gold In Montreal
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/24/travel/martyrs-tales-angels-of-gold-in-montreal.html
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- July 24, 1988
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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July 24, 1988
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Section 5, Page
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WERE Mark Twain to return to Montreal he would still find appropriate the oft-quoted observation he made on his first visit, that a person could stand on any street corner in Montreal, throw a stone and it would hit a church.
Montreal's reputation as a city of churches and saints has not diminished over the years. The impetus for this ''city of a hundred steeples'' came from Jacques Cartier when he stepped ashore along the St. Lawrence River in 1535 and in the name of the King of France planted a cross. Soon, French missionaries were preaching the gospel to native Indians, and with time there arose chapels, churches and shrines. Today there are well over 100, the majority with religious, artistic and architectural links to Europe but with a spirit and role firmly identified as being of the New World and of Montreal; following are seven that exemplify the link. St. Joseph's Oratory
One of the largest ecclesiastical buildings in the world, St. Joseph's Oratory was the dream of a small, frail and illiterate layman, Brother Andre, who for 40 years served as porter and handyman to priests and students at Notre-Dame College. The oratory is Brother Andre, a person of no intellectual, social or economic status, but with a greatness of spirit and a persistent, grand vision, who literally went to the mountain to erect a church dedicated to St. Joseph.
Brother Andre (1845-1937) was in his early 30's when stories of his cures started circulating. In 1904 he built the wooden chapel that was to become the first stage of the oratory. At his death, a million mourners filed past his open coffin in one week. He was beatified in 1982.
The oratory sits on the northern flank of Mount Royal. The crypt, or lower church, built of limestone, seats 1,000 and was finished in 1917. There are paintings and stained-glass windows on the life of St. Joseph and a white marble statue of St. Joseph and Child, whose aureole evokes Bernini. The adjacent Votive Chapel has a collection of crutches and canes left by grateful pilgrims and close by is the simple black marble tomb of Brother Andre.
Escalators lead to an upper level of the basilica, built with a granite exterior and a concrete interior. Brother Andre's museum contains memorabilia, the three rooms where he lived, worked and died and a 15-minute film on his life. A terrace opens on the statue-lined garden path called Way of the Cross and to a summer theater for outdoor re-enactments of the Stations of the Cross.
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