Cardinal Marc Ouellet takes part in the Pontifical Council for Culture’s Plenary Assembly on Women’s Cultures in Rome, Feb. 6, 2015. / Bohumil Petrik/CNA.Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, was accused of sexual assault in a civil suit brought against the Archdiocese of Quebec.
According to AFP, the class action lawsuit filed on August 16 comprises the testimonies of 101 individuals who allege they were sexually abused by clerics or Church employees between 1940 and the present. In the lawsuit, 88 clerics face charges.
A woman accuses Ouellet of assaulting her many times when she was a pastoral intern for the archdiocese of Quebec between 2008 and 2010, while he was archbishop of Quebec. She explained how he kissed her and slipped his hand down her back to her buttock.
The reported occurrences involving Ouellet happened at public occasions, according to the CBC.
According to the lawsuit, the claimed victim wrote to Pope Francis in January 2021 about Cardinal Ouellet, and on February 23, 2021, she got an email stating that the Pope had ordered Father Jacques Servais to examine the cardinal. Her final contact with Servais occurred the next month, and “no conclusion concerning the complaints against Cardinal Marc Ouellet has been sent” to her as of yet.
Against the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a second class-action lawsuit was filed. 193 alleged victims accuse 116 De La Salle Brothers of sexual abuse in this case.
At the age of 23, Ouellet was ordained as a priest for the Diocese of Amos in 1968. In 1972, he joined the Sulpicians. In 2001, he was ordained a bishop and named secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
In 2010, he was named head of the Congregation for Bishops and president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America. He served as archbishop of Quebec from 2002 until 2010.
Ouellet has been vocal on sexual abuse and priesthood formation.
At a 2018 conference of the Presidents of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe, he said, “We would need more women to participation in the (training) of priests” in order to prevent abuse.
In a 2020 interview with Donne Chiesa Mondo, he reinforced this position, stating, “for the priest, learning to relate to women in the context of formation is a humanising factor which promotes the balance of a man’s personality and affect.”
The cardinal said that he believed the Church would benefit enormously from a larger number of women on seminary formation teams, as theology, philosophy, and spirituality instructors, and “in particular in vocational discernment.”
In recent years, as more information about the Vatican’s knowledge of Theodore McCarrick has surfaced, Ouellet and Archbishop Vigano engaged in a verbal dispute.
In an October 2018 letter, Ouellet said it was communicated to Vigano in 2011 that McCarrick “had to obey certain conditions and restrictions because of rumours about his behaviour in the past,” and that he “was strongly urged not to travel and not to appear in public, in order not to provoke further rumours about him. It is false to present the measures taken against him as ‘sanctions’ decreed by Pope Benedict XVI and annulled by Pope Francis.”
And in January of 2019, Ouellet stated that his congregation had prevented the U.S. bishops from voting in November on ideas to address the sex abuse crisis because it considered that more time was required to examine the measures.