In the previous issue of MICHAEL, in an article on the 50th anniversary of the death of Louis Even, founder of the MICHAEL magazine, we talked about the event that changed his life in 1934 when he was almost 50 years of age: his encounter with the concepts of Economic Democracy, or Social Credit, developed by the Scottish engineer Clifford Hugh Douglas.
This article follows the first 50 years of Louis Even's life, and aims to highlight the extent to which he was a figure with extraordinary qualities from an early age and throughout his entire career. He came from a large Catholic family which instilled in young Louis the values that won the admiration of all who knew him and led thousands of people to follow him in this Movement for the financial and social liberation of all.
by Thérèse Tardif
Louis Even was born on March 23, 1885 in Montfort-sur-Meu, near Rennes, in Brittany, France. He was baptised the following day in the parish church which was then dedicated to Saint John the Baptist.
Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673–1716) was the great apostle of Brittany and was blessed with a devotion to the Virgin Mary. He was born in the parish of Montfort-sur-Meu, like Louis Even. It was in his honour that the future founder of MICHAEL was given the name Louis-Marie, and it can be said that he was a faithful imitator of his patron saint, for he too had a great devotion to Mary.
The church's name was changed to honour Saint Louis-Marie-Grignon de Montfort after his canonisation in 1947.
During his lifetime, Saint Louis-Marie Grignon had a burning desire to come to Canada, but the Holy Father reserved him for France, which was in great need of missionaries at the time. Two centuries later, seeing the needs of Canada, perhaps Saint Louis-Marie and Saint John the Baptist (patron saint of French Canadians) consulted each other in heaven to send Louis-Marie Even de Montfort to Canada. St. John the Baptist was not afraid and was ultimately martyred by beheading. Louis Even too, was not afraid, and also proclaimed, like John the Baptist, "You don't have the right!"
Louis Even's parents, Pierre Even and Marguerite Vitre, had 16 children. Four died at birth; the others were Pierre, Aimée-Marie, Marie-Joseph, Marie-Sainte, François, Ernest, Philomène, Émile, Françoise, Louis-Marie, Marie-Louise, and Léon. Louis-Marie was the fourteenth in the family.
Such a large family was already remarkable, but what was even more exceptional was that the good parents knew how to bring up their family to love God and, because of that a veritable garden of saints resulted: seven of the children entered the religious life, including four in the Company of Mary (founded by Saint Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort) and three others became priests.
Of the seven religious, six died between the ages of 20 and 26. They had scarcely consecrated themselves to God by profession or perpetual vows when the Divine Redeemer seized these fresh roses to adorn his glorious Paradise. Did he want to protect them from the religious persecution raging in France, or did he take them as victims, so that from heaven they could, with divine means, assist their brother Louis in his special and difficult mission?
When the Militia of the Immaculate was founded by Saint Maximilian Kolbe, one of its first members died. The founder of the movement was delighted because, he said, "one of our own must be up there with his celestial powers to help the Work develop."
Louis-Marie Even had great affection for his parents. He said with admiration that his mother did not tolerate any sins in the house. Despite her kindness, his mother knew how to be firm in shaping character and correcting faults. She never hesitated to take a small branch of wicker to drive her little Marie-Louise, who was very stubborn and didn't want to go to school. She became a Sister of Wisdom and took the name of Sister Barthélémy.
The Even family grew up on the Poulanière farm, in one of those ancestral stone houses, consisting of a single room for the family, an unfinished attic, and two rooms for the animals. The family room was located between the two animal rooms. Louis-Marie slept under the stairs leading to the attic. He liked to joke that to get dressed he hid between two cows in the animals'flat.
Despite their poverty, Louis-Marie was not a dull child. He loved to laugh and tease his sisters. One day, he was playing with his little brother Léon next to his sister Philomène, who was knitting. He hid one of the knitter's brooches. Philomène was so distressed that she started praying to St. Anthony of Padua to find her knitting spindle. Her brother, Louis, the guilty party, pretended to find the brooch and gave it to his sister. They both thanked St. Anthony, but Louis-Marie felt guilty for the rest of his life for having lied to the holy saint.
When Louis-Marie was 11 years old, a Brother of Christian Instruction (a congregation founded in Ploërmel in 1819 by the venerable Jean-Marie de La Mennais) came to La Poulanière. Pointing to young Louis, he told the father: "This one is old enough for the juniorate." The father agreed, and the child left his father's house for good, only to return once, at the age of 15 to witness the last days of the life of his beloved mother, whom he watched over with other members of the family, awaiting her flight to heaven.
Louis-Marie entered the Livré Juniorate on August 4, 1896, the feast of St. Dominic of the Rosary. He was particularly hard hit during the months that followed. One month later, on September 5 at St-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, his sister Marie-Sainte, a Sister of Wisdom under the name of Athénaïs de Jésus, died at the age of 23. According to the notes of Louis Even's niece, Sister Saint-Barthélémy, herself a nun at St-Laurent, Marie-Sainte was considered the family saint. At the time of her death in St-Laurent sur Sèvre, she appeared to her father, who was returning from Mass in Montfort on Sunday. She told him a secret that he never wanted to reveal. When we learn that the good father, Pierre Even, died in 1897, the following year, we can easily imagine the content of the secret. The mother was to follow her husband and Marie-Sainte to heaven three years later in 1900.
Another of Louis Even's brothers, Émile, who became Brother Barthélémy with the Montfortians, died at the age of 24, in 1905. His sister Françoise, who joined the Augustinian Sisters (Soeurs Hospitalières de saint Augustin) and took the name Soeur Ste-Geneviève, died a novice and had taken her vows on her deathbed.
Louis Even, then a young student, suffered from an unnoticed infirmity. He was deaf. One day the teacher, believing him to be stubborn because he did not carry out a given order, gave him a solid kick, which made him flinch. The poor child complained that he hadn't understood. It was then they realised he was deaf. This called his vocation into question, as deafness was a major handicap for a teaching brother.
There was talk of firing him. This caused him a great deal of pain. But as he was very intelligent, studious and of exemplary piety, it was decided to undertake a novena to the Infant Jesus of Prague to obtain his cure. Once the novena was over, he improved sufficiently, and the superiors decided to keep him. We can now understand why Louis Even maintained a lifelong devotion to the Infant Jesus of Prague, remembering the promise: "The more you honour Me, the more I will give you."
On February 2, 1901, the Feast of the Purification of Mary, Louis-Marie Even entered the novitiate at Ploërmel. There he received the holy habit and took the name of Brother Amaury-Joseph. He took his first vows on February 2, 1902.
However, the storm that had been darkening the political horizon in France for a long time erupted violently, destroying or dispersing all the religious congregations at the same time. Threatened by the Combes Law of July 1, 1901 on the contract of association, Parliament rejected all their requests for association. In 1903, the Reverend Brother Abel of Christian Instruction received official notification that the Institute would be dissolved.
From then on, the brothers were forbidden to teach or wear the religious habit in France. Those who resisted were driven out and their houses destroyed or looted. For many of the brothers, this meant secularisation. Louis Even's younger brother, Léon, was also in Ploërmel at this time. As he was only 14 years of age, he was sent back to his family.
But for the most advanced in religious life and for the most fervent who decided to remain religious, their fate was exile. Seeing the storm coming before the total collapse, the brothers sent their best members to do mission work.
Louis Even had just finished his studies when Father de la Motte, Provincial of the Jesuits in the Rocky Mountains, visited Ploërmel in August 1902. He wanted to obtain brothers for the schools of the Amerindian tribes in the northwest area of the US.
The law banning teaching by religious congregations had just been passed by the French Parliament in July, and the brothers, expelled from France, would be available for foreign countries. A first group of six volunteers was formed. Louis Even was one of them.
Louis Even left his beloved France for America in February 1903. [Sixty-five years later in 1968, he returned for a brief tour with the other Directors of MICHAEL.] Boat journeys were difficult in those days, lasting almost a month, and Louis Even was 17 years of age.
It was at the Mission des Coeurs l'Alène De Smet in Idaho that the brothers perfected their English under the guidance of Jesuit priest, Father Athuis, and completed the 1902-1903 school year. Louis Even had an extraordinary memory and loved flowers. He sometimes would cultivate them instead of studying the day's lesson, which was a page of a text memorised in English. One day Father Arthuis arrived for the lesson, and Louis Even, having not yet read it, quickly skimmed through the day's page. Without delay, the Father asked him to recite it... He recited part of it, then stopped short, saying: "Excuse me, Father, I didn't have time to read any further." Soon thereafter, Louis Even was appointed to teach to the Gros Ventre tribe at the St. Ignace Mission in Montana from 1904 to 1906.
There are two important facts to highlight at this stage of Louis Even's life, which clearly demonstrate the action of Providence which directed him in a marvellous way: his study of English and his training as a teacher. To teach the Amerindians in the US, he had to learn English. He mastered it so well that he was later able to fully understand the technical economic theories of Clifford Hugh Douglas.
As a teacher, he was able to translate and explain concepts in simple, accessible language. In 1978, a retired French civil servant in economics and politics said of him: "I have met many professors in my life, but I have never met one who could explain things as clearly as Louis Even." Douglas himself said of Louis Even that he was one of the few who understood him perfectly.
Louis Even, then Brother Amaury-Joseph, arrived in Canada on the feast day of St. John the Baptist, June 24, 1906. In August 1906, Brother Amaury-Joseph began his teaching career in Grand'Mère. From 1907 to 1911, he taught at St-François School in the Immaculate Conception Parish on Rachel Street in Montreal.
However, his deafness worsened in those years and he had no hearing aid to assist him. It became impossible to supervise pupils which became a great ordeal for him, as he had taken so much pleasure in developing children's intelligence and instilling in them good principles and devotion to Mary. Louis Even had to resign himself to the fact that his career as a teacher was coming to an end. But this was God's Will.
He was taken back to the Mother House of the Brothers of Christian Instruction in Laprairie, and, in September 1911, he began work in the printing shop. The superiors could not have known that he was to become the illustrious publisher and editor of Vers Demain, and that this apprenticeship would serve him well.
He set up a printing shop
The following notes are from Brother Pachomius, who was an accountant at the printing shop during Louis Even's time. His blood brother, the good Brother Clément-Marie, was Louis Even's great collaborator. Brother Clément died in November 1979. He remained in correspondence with Louis Even until the latter's death. But let's listen to Brother Pachomius:
"When he arrived here in Laprairie, he was put to work at the printing shop. We had a very primitive printing press. The typesetting was done letter by letter with clamps. We composed the lines and pages by hand, letter by letter. And that's where Mr. Even and my brother, Brother Clément, worked together for a long time.
"Mr. Even was very intelligent and brilliant. He insisted that we buy a linotype. It's a big machine, very complicated, especially at the time when we had no idea about these machines. Mr. Even worked day and night to learn how to handle and use it. In the meantime, we had a big contract to print all the English books for use in all the schools in the province.
"It was Mr. Even who worked, and I can assure you that he worked day and night, putting together these English books and then printing them on very primitive presses. It was an extraordinary job that required stamina and intelligence to understand how the machine worked and to put this work on the market. He already knew English, and he learned Latin and German, working day and night.
Brother Amaury-Joseph took his perpetual vows on August 24, 1912 on Saint Bartholomew's Day. This was the feast day of his brother Emile, Brother Bartholomew who died at the age of 24. St. Bartholomew's Day became a great feast day in the Even family. Emile and Marie-Louise, Louis Even's brother and sister, and three nephews and nieces took his name. Louis-Marie Even solemnly consecrated himself as a slave of love to Jesus through Mary that same year, 1912.
Ultimately, after acquiring extraordinary training at home, then later with the brothers, through his mortifications and prayers, his deafness served him as a cloister. Louis-Marie Even, with his experience in the printing business, his strong soul, virile spirit, and invulnerable to the corruption of the political world, was ready to undertake the mission for which God had prepared him so well.
He was released from his vows by Rome on November 20, 1920 and left the community on November 24. This was unquestionably God's plan. We can see from his life's journey that, in God's plan, his entry into the brothers was not the definitive vocation, but the preparation for the foundation of a great work to "Build the Kingdom of the Immaculate". Is this not what happened to the Blessed Virgin herself, who, having consecrated herself to the Temple, had to leave it to accomplish the most sublime of missions: that of becoming the Mother of God? God forms His saints according to the mission they have to accomplish. He made Louis Even a great apostle of justice.
To accomplish his mission, Louis Even had to work with the workers, which is what he did when he joined the Garden City Press printing plant in Sainte-Anne de Bellevue, west of Montreal. The following year, on December 10, 1921, he married Laura Leblanc in Montreal, who died on December 5, 1962 at 87. They had four children: a son, François, who became a lawyer and died in 2006, at 83, and three daughters, all of whom became teachers: Gemma, who died in 2017, at 92, Agnès, who died in 2020, at 93 and Rose-Marie, who died in 2014, at 84.
Like all families, Louis Even, responsible for a family of four children and a wife, had to cope with the impact of the Depression between the years 1929 and 1939. However, a few years after his father's death, his son François told journalists that he and his sisters had never lacked for anything. All the children accessed and enjoyed professional careers, despite the privations of that decade in world history. v
Thérèse Tardif
As we saw in the previous issue of MICHAEL, it was as an employee of James John Harpell at Garden City Press that in 1934 Louis Even discovered the solution, not only to the economic crisis of the 1930s, but also to the current financial problems of all families and governments, when he found the writings of the Scottish engineer Clifford Hugh Douglas. A few years after this discovery, he founded the magazines, Vers Demain and MICHAEL, still in publication today.
In the next issue, we will explain why Louis Even decided to advance Douglas' teaching by focusing on the education of the population rather than pursuing political goals to bring Economic Democracy to society.