Father Louis

Born in 1732 at St-Nicolas and baptised Jean Demers, he was the son of Louis Demers and Thérèse Gagnon. In 1757 he was ordained a Récollet priest under the given name Louis.

It was by taking on duties normally reserved to the secular clergy that he left his mark on our region. Short of manpower after the Conquest, the bishop of Québec had to turn to the religious orders to find the priests needed to serve the parishes. Louis was thus first parish priest of Bécancourt from 1764 to 1767, then of Gentilly, St-Pierre-les-Becquets and St-Jean-Deschaillons all at once from 1767 to 1789, except between 1774 and 1779 in the case of Gentilly, which was served during those years by the parish priest of Bécancourt.

Beyond his ministry, he left his mark on the region in many ways. He first encouraged the settlement in the area of numerous Demers, members of his extended family. He was also known as an architect of religious buildings. He built himself a vast presbytery at St-Pierre before 1770, and in the same period he directed the construction of the church of Ste-Anne-de-la-Pérade. What was to be the first church of St-Édouard-de-Gentilly was likewise his work. A dispute between certain parishioners and the bishop of Québec, Bishop Briand, over where it should stand delayed the start of the work. The bishop indeed suspected Father Louis of quietly feeding the dissenters their arguments, which cost him that charge between 1774 and 1779 once peace had been restored. As the work made little progress under the direction of the parish priest of Bécancourt, he took back the charge and the building of the church, which he completed only in 1787.

He was also behind a saw and shingle mill on the rivière des Orignaux, in the 4th concession of the seigneury of St-Pierre, so that, as he put it, its inhabitants might give their humble cabins a decent roof. The parish archives have it that he worked on it with his own hands. In 1786 he went into partnership with DeSales Laterrière, a physician whose common-law wife was living at St-Pierre, to run and repair the mill and to build a second one. The partnership lasted only a year and ended in a lawsuit. After leaving St-Pierre he handed the mill over to members of his family, in the early 1780s.

In 1789 he was appointed superior of his order's monastery in Montréal. From there he witnessed, powerless, its dissolution in both men and property at the wish of the British government. He was its last priest.

Active and quarrelsome by nature, he fell out first with his fellow religious and then with Bishop Briand, who often reproached him for overstepping the mark. He was strongly influenced by his own brother, Brother Alexis, also a Récollet, with whom he shared quarters in Montréal; reading their biographies, one sometimes has the impression that the two were competing to see which could be the more difficult.

All that notwithstanding, he was praised everywhere he went for his zeal and his devotion to his parishioners, to the sick and to the destitute. In Montréal, from 1792 until his death, he was chaplain to the militia staff. His knowledge of medicine was a great help to him in his ministry among the sick. Fifty years after his death people still spoke of his great compassion and of the miracles worked by his ointments and poultices. He died in Montréal on 2 September 1813.

Jacques Lefebvre
S.H.G.L.-B.