CANADA
The Globe and Mail
Gerald Caplan
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Feb. 22 2013
For the many who wish the Catholic Church ill, including numerous Catholics, Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec would be a welcome choice as the next Pope. It was priests like Mr. Ouellet who helped estrange the faithful in once-Catholic Quebec and there is little reason to think he would not make the same contribution to the church universal.
As Quebec church historian and priest Benoit Lacroix puts it, Cardinal Ouellet represents “a very, very conservative current of Catholicism,” just as John Paul II and Benedict XVI have done. And Ouellet makes no bones about it. On women’s equality, birth control, divorce, ordaining women clergy and married priests, he is a proud relic. On abortion, he takes an extreme position, opposing it even in cases of rape. His statements implying that a rape victim who gets an abortion is a murderer earned him harsh condemnation in Quebec. He considers gay marriage “a big crisis…. We don’t know what it means to be human anymore.” Someone should tell him it means love triumphing over cruel dogma.
And on the greatest crisis of the Church since its ambiguous relationship with Nazi Germany, Cardinal Ouellet – like so many of his peers – has put the antiquated institutions of the Church ahead of its shattered victims. On the issue of sexual abuse by priests, he has been silent.
The Quebec president of l’Association des victims de pretres, France Bedard, says she was violated by a Quebec priest. She has requested a meeting with Cardinal Ouellet; he has never responded, she says. She accuses him of being “responsible for the silence, the indifference, the inaction of the Catholic Church in Quebec when it comes to sexual-abuse victims.”
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