ouise Brissette’s sprawling one-storey farmhouse sits nestled on a wooded hill off the road near Saint-Anselme, Quebec, less than an hour from Quebec City. It is the day after Christmas, a Sunday afternoon, and despite the bracing sub-zero cold, inside it is warm, cozy, and utterly chaotic. A short, sturdy woman in her early sixties with cropped silver hair and bright blue eyes, Madame Brissette waves me in through the back door to a foyer piled with dozens of boots, coats, and scarves, and then to a long wooden table in the kitchen. There is a paraplegic boy strapped into his wheelchair and wriggling in the corner. A little girl with giant, wandering eyes shyly approaches me and attempts to introduce herself, with great difficulty. In the first room along the hallway, past the kitchen, toddlers stumble and crawl among plastic trucks and airplanes and blocks; in the next, slightly older kids gleefully scream as they play Wii Sports. At any given time, Brissette’s family includes two dozen or more children, ranging in age from infants to teenagers, with cognitive and physical disorders from barely recognizable to severe.

Brissette has devoted her life to helping the most vulnerable, in an expression of her deep Catholic piety. After a tour of the main house, we take a walk along a path through the snowbound woods, past simple crosses marking the graves of children under her care who have died, to a bungalow that houses a chapel. Set in the main room, with folding chairs arranged in front of it, the altar is a slab of local granite topped with a cross of lashed together birch branches. It is the kind of makeshift altar one imagines early Quebec missionaries praying in front of. It is also where Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the former archbishop of Quebec and primate of Canada, often sought refuge from the clamour of public life.

“I felt connected to him from the first time I asked him to come baptize one of the infants,” Brissette tells me. “He was very close to the children. He is a man of emotion as well as wisdom, and he loved their simplicity and transparency.” Indeed, children are central to the vision of the Catholic Church: they not only represent future generations of the faithful, but they also provide an example of the love and trust human beings are capable of before being warped by the demands, and temptations, of adulthood.

Children are also central to perhaps the worst crisis the Church has faced since the Reformation, one that makes the more recent secularization of Western societies seem pale by comparison. Over the past decade, as many of the literally tens of thousands of victims assaulted by priests in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s go public, sexual abuse scandals have infected dioceses across Europe and both North and South America, and the most recent incidents, stemming from the systemic molestation of children in Ireland’s ubiquitous Catholic schools, are by far the worst. Contrary to the impression propagated by the media, however, it is no more likely that your local parish priest is a predatory serial pedophile than, say, the principal at your children’s elementary school may be. The problem is that priests are meant to be held to higher moral and spiritual standards than other people are; they are supposed to have been called to their vocations by God. The scandals have gravely damaged the credibility of the entire priesthood, as well as that of Church leaders, who protected abusers by either ignoring complaints against priests altogether, or by transferring them to new dioceses with minimal counselling, without so much as alerting the secular authorities.

When Pope Benedict XVI called Cardinal Ouellet to Rome last June to serve as prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, one of the most powerful positions in the Vatican (as well as appointing him president of the Pontifical Commission on Latin America), he put him in a position that will be critical to any enduring solution to sexual abuse within the Church. The prefect oversees the final vetting of candidates for bishoprics around the world before the pope makes the final choice; those bishops, in turn, are ultimately responsible for the priests in their dioceses. Ouellet was most likely placed in such an important and sensitive position because he is a respected and worldly North American leader who has not been tainted by scandal, and because he has been a trusted intellectual ally of the conservative elite that has dominated the Church since the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978. In fact, Vatican insiders agree that Ouellet is on the short list to become the next pope, should the eighty-four-year-old Benedict XVI die anytime soon. The open question is whether the Church’s current uncompromising approach will eventually serve to rebuild the trust and respect of an increasingly disillusioned laity.

tanding at the far edge of the piazza in front of the Quirinale Palace in late January, soon after arriving in Rome to speak with Ouellet, I can see out over the city’s dense old quarters to the majestic dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica, built on one of the Church’s holiest sites, where Saint Peter was reputedly buried after being crucified circa AD 67. Viewed from a distance, at dusk, it seems to sit over busy, disorderly, sensuous Rome in austere, paternal judgment. It has the sombre nobility and sublime melancholy of power, and is as distant from Madame Brissette’s chapel in rural Quebec as one could imagine.

Ouellet may have made a point of being accessible, especially to young people, while in Quebec, but since he became prefect of the Congregation of Bishops he has stopped giving media interviews, even to the Catholic press; it was said that he had entered a period of reflection. In the months leading up to my trip, I made repeated attempts to contact his office: calls to the Vatican at four in the morning Toronto time were answered, if at all, by an elderly-sounding woman who spoke Italian; faxes went unanswered. Just two days before my flight to Rome, I received a brief, formal missive from Monsignor Serge Poitras, adjunct undersecretary for the Congregation of Bishops: “His Eminence will receive you.”

I arrive at Saint Peter’s Square, the main entry point to Vatican City, in the early afternoon. Among the throngs of tourists and pilgrims stands a huge group of Africans decked out in bright orange traditional attire, as well as a cluster of Korean nuns, both indications of how the Church’s centre of gravity has shifted away from Europe and North America. On one side of Bernini’s great colonnades, I receive my credentials at an elegant press office before navigating a crowd control maze and a security check that would match the ones in any airport. On the other side, dodging lineups at washrooms and gift shops, hopping over more security fences patrolled by Swiss Guards in tricolour uniforms who give the impression of ticket takers to a ride at Disneyland, I reach yet another office, where I surrender my passport and am finally issued an official pass and a name tag.

Compared with the bustle and noise of Saint Peter’s Square, Vatican City seems eerily quiet, like the headquarters of a multinational corporation. The Apostolic Palace is bordered by a garden with a chapel, Greek sculptures, a grove of palms, and flower beds. A dark sedan glides around a circular; a priest with a briefcase walks by determinedly. I find my way to the Casa di Santa Marta, a $25-million luxury residence built by John Paul II, where I am to meet Ouellet. With its creamy yellow walls, moulded ceilings, and chandeliers, the place has a reserved eighteenth-century elegance, but it is also equipped with all the high-tech amenities. A receptionist emerges from a booth filled with phone consoles and flat screen computer monitors to escort me to a well-appointed sitting room.

I had already heard a great deal about Cardinal Ouellet, and not just from Madame Brissette. A shy young mother I approached in the Quebec City Cathedral the day after Christmas summed him up as “very innocent, very saintlike,” and Archbishop Thomas Collins of Toronto told me, “He’s a very gentle, humble man, a holy man, but you really must meet him to understand.” So I’m disarmed when the man who comes through the door is light of foot, with a bemused, almost boyish smile on his face. Dressed in a pair of black slacks, a sweater, and a priest’s collar, with a crucifix hanging prominently around his neck, the sixty-six-year-old cardinal greets me in a Québécois accent by saying, “So, why did you want to see me — are you Catholic?”

Marc Ouellet was born in La Motte, into a big religious family. The Quebec he grew up in was steeped in Catholicism through and through, but he did not feel his vocation to become a priest early on. “It started when I was an adolescent, through the study of the stars,” he says, his gaze behind wire-rimmed glasses at once piercing and sympathetic. “I had these questions about the cosmos. I was searching for the grand scheme of things, and I wanted to give my life to something important.” He had a supportive family — his grandfather felt a particular affection for him and discerned something special in him before he did — as well as the guidance of a good local priest. One of the seminal moments in his move toward a life in the basilica, however, was completely fortuitous. “When I was seventeen, I broke my leg playing hockey — I was a healthy boy, and I liked sports!” he says. “So I started meditating for fifteen minutes a day, which helped me listen to God.”