Those are the words of Father James Martin, S.J., about the news that Brother André Bessette, C.S.C., will be formally declared a saint on October 17 — and I must say I am equally delighted by the announcement. Brother André (1845–1937) was known as the “miracle man of Montreal” because of the widespread healings with which he was credited. His most lasting achievement is the building of St. Joseph’s Oratory, the massive church on the top of the mountain that sits in the middle of Montreal island. I spent my boyhood years — the 1970s — in Montreal, and I found St. Joseph’s a wonderful place to spend some hours after school. Montreal was then, and is now, a very secular place, but St. Joseph’s preserved some of the devout spirit of the French-Canadian Catholics of the pre-1960s era. Brother André’s room is preserved there, and you can’t help but feel the man’s humble spirit when you look at its sparse furnishings.

Fun fact: One of the most touching religious films I’ve ever seen was made, in part, on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Oratory — and it wasn’t even about Catholicism! The Quarrel (1992), based on Chaim Grade’s story “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” is the story of two Jewish men — one Hassidic, one a religious skeptic — who, having lost their whole families to the Nazi regime, meet in Montreal in 1948 and try to hash out the possibility of religious faith in the wake of the Holocaust.