CHAPTER XVI
The Miracle Man of Montreal—Brother Andre
Whose Great Work Has Done Great Good—A
Youth With a Strange Power—Authentic
Accounts of Some of the Miracles—All
Faiths Benefited by Him.
The day of miracles is not past. Ever since Christ raised the dead, healed His suffering suppliants, gave voice to the dumb, sight to the blind, and hearing to the deaf; ever since He turned water into wine at the marriage feast at Cana and fed the multitude with five loaves of bread and two small fishes, down through the long ages, miracles have been wrought. There were many sincere believers in them, but there were more scoffers and doubters. As it was then, so it is with the world to-day. Time was, especially in recent years, that many non-Catholics sincerely believed that these alleged miracles existed merely in the untutored minds of the superstitious followers of the Roman Catholic Church.
But the wonderful works of divine healers of the Protestant faith—notably Rev. Mr. Hickson, an Anglican, and Mrs. McPherson, of another Protestant denomination, in different places in Canada and the United States—have largely dispelled that idea, and thousands of intellectual people of different nationalities and of different creeds are to-day firmly convinced that the healer has an almost supernatural Divine power which is exercised for the benefit of suffering humanity.
Shrines throughout the world have existed for centuries, and some of them gained a world-wide reputation for the remarkable cures and conversions that have been claimed for them. Of these, perhaps Lourdes in France and Sainte Anne de Beaupré, near the city of Quebec, have acquired the greatest fame. It is not of these, however, that I am writing, but of the unpretentious little shrine of St. Joseph on Mount Royal at Montreal, where Brother André, the Miracle Man, whose great work relieving the suffering of their ills for many years has been testified to by hundreds upon hundreds of people who have been restored to health and happiness by his intercession and prayers. He is a remarkable man, with no pretensions whatever of being other than the humble instrument of a higher power through which he is permitted to do good to his fellow-men. He is not the Miracle Man of the movies, which is screened from Frank Packard’s remarkable book. Mr. Packard, who is an old friend of mine, told me that his miracle man was a creation of his own brain.