According to family legend, it was a neighbourhood friend, an Irish-Catholic kid, who convinced my father to make the trek up Mount Royal to Saint Joseph's Oratory. It was 1934, and my father, 17 then, had contracted polio four years earlier. He wore a brace on his paralyzed right leg and walked with a cane. Although he was Jewish and knew he had no business in a church, especially one that famous, he was also a Montrealer and knew what every ecumenical Montrealer, then as now, knows: you want a smoked-meat sandwich in this town, go to Schwartz's; you want a miracle, go to the Oratory.
Still, his friend clinched the argument. He'd heard stories about its founder, Brother André, a.k.a. "the Miracle Man of Mount Royal." He'd also visited the place and seen the crutches, canes and prosthetics stacked to the rafters —
"a forest of mementoes" left behind by those healed on the spot. "What have you got to lose?" he asked my father. At the Oratory, the priest evidently felt the same way. He gave my father a rosary and sent him away with instructions on converting. My father wasn't healed,
of course, and when he limped home and his mother saw the rosary, he was in big trouble.
