Dr. Fr. Maxime Allard, OP of
College Dominicain in Ottawa, Canada presented on the life and social
transformation of Pere G. H. Levesque in 20th century Quebec. In
Quebec in the 1960’s French Catholics lived in the rural areas but the cities
were primarily controlled by English-speaking Protestants. Levesque sought a way to keep the Catholic
faith in a Protestant land. He did not
want to create Catholic ghettos, so the unions, cooperatives and schools he
proposed were run by Catholics but open to all.
He sent students from the university he founded in Ottawa to northern
France to study Economics, Sociology and Politics but to do so with a heart
imbued by the Catholic faith. His basic
thesis was that through love of self and of others, individuals flourish and
become free. His socio-economic ethics
draw upon Aquinas and Pius XI. Over
time the University of Ottawa began to turn out large numbers of priests with
PhD. Rather than sending them out to
create more Catholic universities, Levesque sent them to invade and take over
other existing universities with their intellectual tradition and knowledge of
sociology, economics and politics. Thus,
Levesque and his followers eventually brought about the social transformation
of Quebec.
