“For see your vocation, brethren, that there are not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble. But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that He may confound the wise: and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that He may confound the strong. And the base things of the world and the things that are contemptible, hath God chosen: and things that are not, that He bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in His sight.”

–I Corinthians 1:26-29

This is the Second Conference in our Parish Lenten Mission series, “Frere André, the Miracle Man of Montreal”. Last week we were introduced to the Holy Cross Brother André Bessette, who filled the lowly office of portier, the porter, at the Congregation’s College NotreDame in Montreal for decades. His was a hidden life and a seemingly insignificant life. And yet, when he died on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6th, 1937, at the age of 91, over a million people turned out to pay their respects over the days of mourning. It was a spectacle of mass-mourning such as Canada had never seen, and it reached across the border into the United States, particularly the New England states. So something quite mysterious was going on in the life of this man, which surfaced so dramatically upon his death. I suggest to you that in Frere André we see an example of the fulfillment of these verses from First Corinthians, about how God chooses what is foolish, weak, base and contemptible in the eyes of the world in order to overturn all worldly expectations, and thereby show forth His divine power precisely from where it was least expected to come.

Alfred (the future “Frere André”) Bessette was to be sure an unprepossessing man: uneducated, uncultivated, suffering from all of the effects of chronic poverty in his physical person. But at the same time we might say he also embodied the “marginalization”, if you will, of a large mass of the Catholic people of French Canada in that day.
The French Canadians, the “Québecois”, were a conquered people–the descendants of the French colonists of New France who had been overwhelmed by the British military invasion of Quebec during the French and Indian War (1756-1763) and permanently cut off from France thereafter. In addition, after the American Revolution, British Loyalist refugees from the Thirteen Colonies found refuge in Canada and were rewarded with generous land-grants by the British Crown. In 1845, when Alfred Bessette was born, Canada was known as British North America. The situation of the French Canadians in the 1800s is comparable, I think, to that of the Irish, also a conquered people under the British.
In both places you had a large surplus rural population trying to eke out its living Frere André’s father Isaac was a construction worker and carpenter, supporting a family of ten children (Alfred/Frere André was the 8th child): he died cutting wood in the forest when Alfred was 10. His mother Clotilde died of tuberculosis two years later. The poor household was immediately dissolved: the younger children split up among relatives in the extended family. As an adolescent youth Alfred was sent out to make his way in the world, however he could.
We are familiar with the flood of Irish immigration into the United States in the wake of the Great Famine of the mid-1840s. There was also a flood of French Canadian immigration into the United States, particularly into New England seeking work in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. By the beginning of the 1900s there were as many French Canadians living in New England as in the whole of Quebec. Alfred Bessette joined this immigration.

We know nothing of the years of his life as a migrant worker in New England, although we know a great deal about the harsh working conditions at that time. He returned to Quebec in 1867, the year Canada became a Dominion instead of a colony. He was 22, still on his own as an unskilled worker. He settled in the village of Saint-Césaire, where he was acquainted with the parish priest there, Fr. André Provençal. Under the guidance of this priest, a new chapter of his life was to begin.