I was close to dying and turned to Our Lady

A successful general sales manager at Microsoft Corporation, Édouard Montier, married and the father of three, decided to give up his career in order to support missionaries, by founding the Entrepreneurs Solidarity Network (RES). What caused him to make such a radical change?

Édouard Montier: "It was the result of a call to stop devoting my life to building my own tower of Babel, in the logic of the secular corporate world. My call was to help build a different world, devoting my attention to those whom the principles of the American entrepreneurial world prevented me from seeing.

The turning point was a trip to Mauritania in 2005, where I contracted cholera while visiting a slum with the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa. I almost died from it. I turned to Our Lady for help, telling her: If you give me more time to live, I will never forget these nuns and poor people; I will devote my life to them. I survived and retired from professional life to devote myself entirely to the Entrepreneurs Solidarity Network (RES).

I am still at the head of a business as RES’ manager, but the engine of my (volunteer) work is no longer some kind of intellectual satisfaction and the management of billions of dollars, but the joy of seeing Christ in all these people in the world whom I help to work together. God needs us, Catholics, to discover how good it is to give."

Story told by Marie Lechapelays in La Croix Newspaper, March 19, 2018