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CROSS EXAMINED The best job in the world Benoît-Marc Boyer loves his job as a lawyer and vice chancellor of the Archdiocese of Montreal. BY KATHRYN LEGER 'Our passion is to serve people. How can you not be happy?' asks priest and lawyer Benoît-Marc Boyer. B enoît-Marc Boyer never imagined when he trained to become a lawyer that one day he would be called upon to head up a tribunal established to assess whether or not a miracle was real. That day came six years ago when Boyer, a prac- tising lawyer and now vice chancellor at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Montreal, was asked to preside over hearings into the unexplained recovery of a young Quebec boy who suffered severe head injuries when he was struck by a car while riding his bicycle. "I don't oblige anyone to believe in God, but this was divine providence," says Boyer, 45, who fulfilled his boyhood wish to become a priest after entering Grand Séminaire de Montréal for phi- losophy and theology studies in 1990, two months after his swearing-in cer- emony as a new lawyer in Montreal. He had done his articling with the federal Department of Justice, prosecuting cases throughout Quebec. 26 A PRIL 2011 www. CANADIAN Lawyermag.com The miracle tribunal was a necessary step toward the Vatican's recognition last October of sainthood for Holy Cross Brother André, the illiterate doorkeep- er at Collège Notre-Dame who would become known as the "miracle man of Montreal" after people credited him for curing their illnesses through touch and prayer. In a stroke of providence Boyer says prepared him for the tribunal task, he happened to take a law program on the complex process of canonization at the SyLVAIN LÉGARÉ