It is difficult to overstate how compelling the life and example of the Holy Cross Brother Andre was to several generations of devoted, Catholic, working families and students. In like manner, the ultimate construction of the St Joseph Oratory on Mont Royal during the 20th century was a defining mission of their lives. Today, the Oratory, standing tall on the mountain that looms over the city, is its most prominent landmark.

I won’t take time here to re-tell the well-documented life of Brother Andre, a small, slight, humble, and barely-educated school porter. His is one of those stories where no one could possibly have predicted such an outcome from his lack of ambition and impoverished background. Whatever you think of the miracles attributed to him in healing the sick, there is no question but that his quiet influence inspired astonishing results.

Like many of his generation, our father worked as a laborer and craftsman on the construction of the Oratory and chapel, at the same time as he attended classes at St Laurent College and tutored at Holy Cross College across the street, where Brother Andre minded the front door for many years of his life. Almost everyone Paul Emile knew worked at one time or another, in multiple capacities, on the construction, which began in 1914. Construction came to a halt during the most severe downturn of the mid-Depression years but resumed as funds were available; the Oratory was not completed until the middle of the century.

Our family heard the most about our father’s work on the dome—laying on his back most of the time to paint its ceiling.

Little of that work is left after a minimalist—some might say brutalist— refinishing of the central nave in the 1960s. He may also have worked on the crypt and side chapels. On visits back to the city, he took photos at various times of a particular view from the outside and that may be another location of much of his work on the structure as a young man.

We can imagine that families of the time were grateful to have so many of their children drawn to the charisma of Brother Andre. In addition, at a time of rapid modernization, the building of the Oratory would have provided  opportunities for their young men to serve apprenticeships on such an immense project. For three generations, the Papin/Pepin family line of Ovide, David, and Albert had been “forgerons” whose industry and craft largely derived from horsepower—soon to be replaced by electricity and automobile engines. At the same time, demand for construction  skills of all types, even in bad times, must have made them seem a reliable career option: There were fewer and slower changes in the building trades so those trades promised security for the longer haul.

Somehow, however, our father must have also argued successfully for the music and art studies that he also pursued in the College of St Laurent at the same time.

I think that when we siblings try to describe to other people all the many skills our father learned and employed to make a living, people think we must be exaggerating. But instead, I think that many men of his generation simply saw varied skills—not as too much of a “mixed bag”—but simply as a way to be fully- and self-employed in good times and in bad. In a way, he lived and learned in the twentieth century lessons of self-reinvention that we are re-learning in the twenty-first.

The time of Brother Andre must also have shown the families and students who admired him for his selflessness and vision, how powerful the combination of cause and community could be. Perhaps that is why our father later undertook to establish such large-scale church music programs for young people and adults in Florida. Even today, the children and families our father attracted to those musical and community enterprises marvel how great their impact was on their lives.