Page 4 - Michael 2024 January

50th anniversary of the death of Louis Even

The discovery of Social Credit was a turning point in his life

by Alain Pilote
Louis Even, the found-
er of MICHAEL, died on 29
September 1974 at the age
of 89, 50 years ago in 2024.
Throughout this year, start-
ing with this issue of Janu-
ary-February 2024, we will be
highlighting several aspects “Social Credit has been
of Louis Even’s remarkable
life, including his spirituality, a light onto my path.
his courage and his trust in
Louis Even Divine Providence. I must make it known
However, we must begin
this series with the event that changed the course to everyone.”
of his life: his discovery of the financial solution de- Louis Even
vised by the Scottish engineer Clifford Hugh Doug-
las, then known as Social Credit—a set of financial
principles and proposals devised in 1917 (and first
enunciated in 1918) by the Scottish engineer Clifford
Hugh Douglas, to address the problem of the chronic By the way, you’ll notice that in recent years
lack of purchasing power in the hands of consumers. we’ve preferred to refer to Douglas’s financial prin-
The words “social credit” mean social money—or ciples as ‘Economic Democracy’ instead of ‘Social
national money, money issued by society—as op- Credit’, to avoid confusion with the system of con-
posed to today’s money which is “bank credit”— trol in Communist China, also called ‘Social Cred-
money issued by banks. it’, which gives or subtracts points to citizens de-
When Louis Even discovered the great light of pending on whether or not they obey government
Social Credit in 1934, he immediately understood to directives. What Douglas, Louis Even and MICHAEL
what extent this solution would perfectly apply the teach is quite the opposite: they talk about money
Church’s teaching on social justice—especially as re- at the service of society, respecting the freedom of
gards the right of all to material goods, the distribu- every citizen.
tion of daily bread to all, through the allocation of a Some people, especially new readers, may won-
social dividend to every human being. der why the MICHAEL magazine always focuses on

the question of money. Louis Even writes: “It is be-
cause all economic problems, and almost all polit-
ical problems, are above all problems of money. We
never claim that the monetary question is the only
one to be settled, the only one that should occupy
us. Not even that it is the most important issue. But
it is the most pressing, because everything is due to
a money problem.”
Look at all the different problems affecting soci-
ety at the moment, and you’ll see that almost all of

Entrance of the headquarters of MICHAEL in
Rougemont, Quebec. With the emergence of the
MICHAEL magazine and the Pilgrims of Saint
Michael, it is a veritable “institute” for training
in social justice and the apostolate that Louis
Even founded in 1939.

4 MICHAEL January/February 2024 www.michaeljournal.org