Mary O’Regan: The Holy Cross Brothers – the religious order to which Little Brother Andre belonged – were often asked by families to prepare a dead body for burial. It may sound an odd practice to us, that a brother in a black cassock would do something that was very murky, and you and I may beg to know if there were no undertakers at the time of the latter part of the 1800s. But indeed there were undertakers, but many of the Catholic folk could not afford it, or they were so pious that they only wanted holy hands to clean their loved one after his or her demise. More here.
