Brother Andre's Heart

St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal looks like Cecil B. DeMille's idea of a cathedral. Enthroned on Mount Royal, the city's highest hill, the oratory is bigger than Notre Dame, its dome only slightly smaller than St. Peter's. It took six master architects 52 years--from 1915 to 1967--to erect, and among its accouterments are the carillon built for the Eiffel Tower, one of the world's largest organs, two wax museums, three banks of escalators, acres of free parking and a restaurant supervised by a full-time French chef.

Star of the oratory, and the subject of much of its religious chrome plating, is the man for whom it was built --a semiliterate French-Canadian orphan named Alfred Bessette, better known as "Brother Andre, the miracle man of Mount Royal." As a religious brother, Bessette served for 40 years as doorkeeper and handyman of Notre Dame College, a boys' school at the foot of the hill. He was humble, devout and frail, a sufferer from chronic dyspepsia. But he had, it is claimed, miraculous healing powers.

By invoking the favors of St. Joseph, his patron saint, and handing out bottles of burned sacramental olive oil, Brother Andre reportedly cured as many as 15,000 crippled, blind and dying pilgrims a year. When he died in 1937, at the age of 91, half a million people filed past his bier, and Brother Andre was put up for sainthood.

His case is still pending in the Vatican. At the oratory, in the meantime, he is being accorded the full trappings of a saint. The oratory publishes a comic book about his life, sells bottles of his "St. Joseph's oil," and maintains a tiny wooden chapel that he built as a holy place. Inside the cathedral, 3,000,000 pilgrims a year file past his marble tomb. Also in the gallery, until recently, was Brother Andre's heart, preserved in an urn filled with a formalin solution. Then on the night of March 15, in one of the decade's more peculiar crimes, someone stole the heart.

The theft appeared professional. To get at the heart, the thieves picked three locks to open a steel door and an iron grille, then chiseled the urn off its marble pedestal--all without attracting the security guards. It was a sort of grisly Rififi; yet no motive has been discerned. A local newspaper received demands for $50,000 in ransom, but they apparently came from cranks. By last week, although Montreal police still had two detectives on the case, the oratory's priests had given up hope. Whatever the motive, the thief may have been doing Brother Andre a favor. Enshrined in the templed glories of package-tour religion, the humble lay brother's heart was painfully out of place.

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