STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND ITS MIRACULOUS CURES
I have just returned from a visit to the Shrine of the Good Sainte
Anne, where three hundred thousand pilgrims worshipped this year. I
have looked upon the holy relics and the crutches left behind by the
cured and my knees are sore from climbing up the sacred stairway.
The Shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, some twenty miles down the river
from Quebec, is the most famous place of the kind on our continent.
Quebec is the capital of French Catholicism, and Beaupré is its Mount
Vernon, where good Catholics pay homage to the grandmother of their
church. The other day a family of five arrived at Ste. Anne; they came
from Mexico and had walked, they said, all the way. Last summer two
priests came here on foot from Boston, and I talked this morning with
a man who organizes weekly pilgrimages from New England. Thousands
come from the United States and Canada, Alaska and Newfoundland. I saw
to-day a couple just arrived in a Pennsylvania motor truck.
On Ste. Anne’s day, July 26th, the number of pilgrims is often twenty
thousand and more. Special electric trains and motor busses carry
the worshippers from Quebec to Ste. Anne. For the accommodation of
overnight visitors, the one street of the village is lined with little
hotels and lodging houses that remind me of our summer resorts. For a
week before Ste. Anne’s day, every house is packed, and sometimes the
church is filled with pilgrims sitting up all night. Frequently parties
of several hundred persons leave Quebec on foot at midnight, and walk
to Ste. Anne, where they attend mass before eating breakfast.
The story of Ste. Anne de Beaupré goes back nearly two thousand
years. The saint was the mother of the Virgin Mary, and therefore the
grandmother of Christ. We are told that her body was brought from
Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and then to Apt, in France, which thereupon
became a great shrine. In a time of persecution her bones disappeared,
but they were later recovered in a miraculous manner. According to
tradition they were revealed to Charlemagne by a youth born deaf, dumb,
and blind. He indicated by signs an altar beneath which a secret crypt
was found. In the crypt a lamp was burning and behind it was a wooden
chest containing the remains of the saint. The young man straightway
was able to see, hear, and speak, and the re-discovered shrine became
a great source of healing. This was exactly seven hundred years before
Columbus discovered America.
The first church of Ste. Anne was erected at Beaupré in 1658. Tradition
says it was built by sailors threatened with shipwreck, who promised
Ste. Anne a new church at whatever spot she would bring them safely
to land. Soon after the shrine was established bishops and priests
reported wonderful cures, and since then, as the fame of the miracles
spread, the shrine has become a great place of worship. Churches,
chapels, and monasteries have been built and rebuilt, and countless
gifts have been showered upon them. The first relic of Ste. Anne
brought here was a fragment of one of her finger bones. In 1892, Pope
Leo XIII gave the “Great Relic,” consisting of a piece of bone from the
saint’s wrist. This is now the chief object of veneration by pilgrims.
On March 29, 1922, the shrine suffered a loss by fire. The great
church, or basilica, was completely destroyed, but the sacred relics
and most of the other articles of value were saved. The gilded wooden
statue of Ste. Anne, high up on the roof over the door, was only
slightly scorched by the blaze. It now stands in the gardens awaiting
the completion of the new church. The new building has been planned
on such a large scale that five years have been allowed for its
construction. Meanwhile, the pilgrims worship in a temporary wooden
structure.
The numerous buildings that now form part of the shrine of Ste. Anne
are on both sides of the village street, which is also the chief
highway along the north bank of the St. Lawrence. On one side the
fenced fields of the narrow French farms slope down to the river. On
the other, hills rise up so steeply that they seem almost cliffs. The
church and the monastery and the school of the Redemptorist Fathers,
the order now in charge of the shrine, are on the river side. Across
the roadway are the Memorial Chapel, the stations marking “The Way of
the Cross,” the sacred stairway, and, farther up the hillside, the
convent of the Franciscan Sisters.
[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: 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.”
Near the church are stores that sell souvenirs, bead crosses, and the
like, the proceeds from which go toward the upkeep of the shrine. At
certain hours each day articles thus purchased, or those the pilgrims
have brought from home, are blessed by the priests in attendance.
Another source of revenue is the sale of the shrine magazine, which has
a circulation of about eighty thousand. Subscribers whether “living or
dead, share in one daily mass” said at the shrine. Pilgrims are also
invited to join the Association of the Perpetual Mass, whose members,
for the sum of fifty cents a year, may share in a mass “said every day
for all time.”
The Director of Pilgrimages told me that the past summer had been
the best season in the history of the shrine. The pilgrims this year
numbered more than three hundred thousand, their contributions were
generous, and the number of cures, or “favours,” large. About one third
of these, said the Director, prove to be permanent. The Fathers take
the name and address of each pilgrim who claims to have experienced a
miraculous cure, and inquiries are made later to find out if relief has
been lasting. The shrine has quantities of letters and photographs as
evidences of health and strength being restored here, and I have from
eye-witnesses first-hand accounts of the joyous transports of the lame,
the halt, and the blind when their ailments vanish, apparently, in the
twinkling of an eye.
I have referred to Quebec as the American capital of French
Catholicism. It is not only a city of many churches, but is also
headquarters for numerous Catholic orders, some of which established
themselves here after being driven from France. The value of their
property holdings now amounts to a large sum, and one of the new
real-estate sub-divisions is being developed by a clerical order. Many
of the fine old mansion homes, with park-like grounds, once owned by
British Canadians, are now in the hands of religious organizations.
The Ursuline nuns used to own the Plains of Abraham, and were about
to sell the tract for building lots when public sentiment compelled
the government to purchase it and convert it into a park. A statue
of General Wolfe marks the spot where he died on the battlefield. It
is the third one erected there, the first two having been ruined by
souvenir fiends.
The homes of the Catholic orders in Quebec supply priests for the
new parishes constantly being formed in Canada. They also send their
missionaries to all parts of the world, and from one of the nunneries
volunteers go to the leper colonies in Madagascar. Other orders
maintain hospitals, orphanages, and institutions identified with the
city’s historic past. Before an altar in one of the churches two nuns,
dressed in bridal white, are always praying, night and day, each couple
being relieved every half hour. In another a lamp burning before a
statue of the Virgin has not been extinguished since it was first
lighted, fifteen years before George Washington was born. Some of the
churches contain art treasures of great value, besides articles rich in
their historical associations.
Driving in the outskirts of Quebec I met a party of Franciscan
monks returning from their afternoon walk. They were bespectacled,
studious-looking young men, clad in robes of a gingerbread brown,
fastened with white girdles, and wearing sandals on their bare feet.
All were tonsured, but I noticed that their shaved crowns were in many
instances in need of a fresh cutting. These men alternate studies with
manual labour in the fields. In front of the church of this order is a
great wooden cross bearing the figure of Christ. Before it is a stone
where the devout kneel and embrace His wounded feet. Near by is also a
statue of St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit Order, standing with one
foot on the neck of a man who represents the heretics.
There are in Quebec a few thousand Irish Catholics, descendants of
people who came here to escape the famine in Ireland. They have built a
church of their own. Another church, shown to visitors as a curiosity,
is that of the French Protestants, who, according to the latest
figures, number exactly one hundred and thirty-five.
Though a city of well over one hundred thousand people, Quebec has an
enviable record for peace and order and for comparatively few crimes.
The credit for this is generally given to the influence of the Church,
which is also responsible, so I am told, for the success of the French
Canadian in “minding his own business.” The loyalty of the people to
their faith is evidenced by the fact that even the smallest village has
a big church. Outside the cities the priest, or curé, is in fact the
shepherd of his flock, and their consultant on all sorts of matters. I
am told, however, that the clergy do not exercise the same control over
political and worldly affairs as was formerly the case, and not nearly
so much as is generally supposed. It is still true, however, that the
Catholic religion is second only to the French language in keeping the
French Canadians almost a separate people.