Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, a prominent prelate who serves as prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops, has joined the list of senior Church officials linked to an abuse case. His name appears in a collective complaint filed by more than 100 victims against the diocese of Quebec and which points the finger at 88 people between representatives of the Church and local employees of the establishment allegedly responsible for sexual assaults from the years 1940. Ouellet, who served as Archbishop of Quebec between 2002 and 2010, currently faces no criminal charges, an investigation by RadioCanada.

The case dates back precisely to those years. The victim, a former intern, is a woman who identifies herself as F., who was doing a voluntary internship as a pastoral worker. The abuse, according to the lawsuit, occurred at public events. “He grabbed me and then…his hands went down my back a little bit,” said the complainant, who told what happened in the program Investigation. “Pretty intrusive to, say, be my superior, the Archbishop of Quebec.” According to her version, the cardinal told her that there was nothing wrong with socializing a little. “It made me very uncomfortable,” she lamented.

This behavior repeated itself several times. “I felt persecuted. It became more and more intrusive, more and more intense, to the point that I stopped attending the events. I tried to avoid his presence as much as possible,” the victim continued. The Archdiocese of Quebec is aware of the charges against the cardinal, as he admitted when questioned about it, but declined to comment further on the complaint.

The lawyer representing the plaintiffs recalled that Ouellet then, as archbishop, had the last word on the contracts of the establishment’s personnel. “At this time, you have a young woman in her twenties facing a powerful man in a position of authority, world famous at the time, who was maybe 60 years old,” the lawyer pointed out. Moreover, when the victim decided to speak about his anguish with those around him, he was told that the cardinal is an expansive man and that she was not the only woman to have suffered this type of “problem” with him. , according to the text. of the complaint.

A priest who was then under the orders of the cardinal in the diocese and who agreed to offer his testimony on condition of anonymity, said in a conversation with Radio-Canada that rumors had circulated about the conduct of Ouellet, who now 78 years old. year. . When he heard the story of the woman complaining, he believed her. “It came as a sheriff who came to put order in the diocese of Quebec, they sent him from Rome,” he recalls. Ouellet returned to the Vatican in 2010 and was promoted to prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops, the body that selects senior Church officials. That same year, he became a cardinal. In 2018, the cardinal mounted a strong defense of the pope when he was accused by the former nuncio in Washington, Carlo Maria Viganò, of covering up abuses by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and called for his resignation.

The complaint, which documents even more serious cases involving clergy officials less prominent than Ouellet, comes three weeks after Pope Francis embarked on a pastoral trip to Canada. During the trip, which the Pontiff himself described as a “penitential pilgrimage”, he apologized for the abuses of the Church in the former boarding schools for indigenous minors. The pope’s apologies sparked expressions of emotion; however, they did not sit well with everyone and also drew criticism for not going beyond words.

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