Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

In the province of Quebec nine tenths of the people are French-speaking Catholics. Every village supports a large church, every house contains a picture of the Virgin Mary, and every road has its wayside shrine.

In the heart of the business and financial districts of Montreal is the Place d’Armes, once the site of a stockade and the scene of Indian fights. There stands the church of Notre Dame, one of the largest in all America.

One of the Redemptorists, the Director of Pilgrimages, told me much that was interesting about Ste. Anne and her shrine. He gave me also a copy of the Order’s advice on “how to make a good pilgrimage.” This booklet urges the pilgrim to hear Holy Mass as soon as possible. It says that “the greatest number of miraculous cures or favours are obtained at the Shrine after a fervent Communion.”

“After Holy Communion,” the Order’s advices continue, “the act most agreeable to Sainte Anne and the one most calculated to gain her favours, is the veneration of her relic.”

The act of veneration is performed by pilgrims kneeling before the shrine containing the piece of Ste. Anne’s wrist bone. It is then that most of the cures are proclaimed. The people kneel in prayer as close to the shrine as the number of worshippers will permit. Those who experience a cure spring up in great joy and cast at the feet of the saint’s statue their crutches or other evidence of their former affliction. In the church I saw perhaps fifty crutches, canes, and sticks left there this summer by grateful pilgrims. At the back of the church I saw cases filled with spectacles, leg braces, and body harnesses, and even a couple of wheel chairs, all abandoned by pilgrims. One rack was filled with tobacco pipes, evidence of promises to give up smoking in return for the saint’s favours.

The miraculous statue of Ste. Anne, before which the pilgrims kneel, represents the saint holding in her arms the infant Christ. On her head is a diadem of gold and precious stones, the gifts of the devout. Below the statue is a slot marked “petitions.” Pilgrims having special favours to ask of Ste. Anne write them on slips of paper and drop them into the box. After three or four months, they are taken out and burned. On the day of my visit the holy relic was not in its usual place in the church, but in the chapel of the monastery, a fireproof building, where it had been moved for safekeeping. It was there that I gazed upon the bit of bone. The relic is encased in a box of solid gold and is encircled by a broad gold band, about the size of a napkin ring, set with twenty-eight diamonds. The box is studded with gems and inlaid with richly coloured enamels. All the precious stones came from jewellery given by pilgrims.

I visited also the “Grotto of the Passion.” This contains three groups of figures, representing events in the life of Christ. In front of the central group is a large, shallow pan, partly filled with water and dotted with the stumps of candles lighted and set there by pilgrims to burn until extinguished by the water. The Grotto is in the lower part of a wooden structure that looks like a church, built on the side of the hill. Above is the “Scala Sancta,” or sacred stairway. Large signs warn visitors that these stairs, which represent those in Pilate’s house, are to be ascended only on the knees. There are twenty-eight steps, and those who go up are supposed to pause on each one and repeat a prayer. As I reverently mounted the steps, one by one, I was reminded of the Scala Sancta in Rome, which I climbed in the same way some years ago. It is a flight of twenty-eight marble steps from the palace of Pilate at Jerusalem, up which our Saviour is said to have climbed. It was brought to Rome toward the end of the period of the crusades, and may be ascended only on the knees.

The stairway at Beaupré is often the scene of miraculous cures, but none occurred while I was there. At the top the pilgrims kneel again and make their devotions, ending with the words, “Good Sainte Anne, pray for us.”