He spent much of the next decade teaching in Colombia and Quebec, before beginning his Ph.D. in theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1978, the first year of John Paul II’s twenty-seven-year reign. The Church was still in the midst of a struggle over its identity, which had come to a head in 1962, when Pope John XXIII formally convened the Second Vatican Council, in response to a growing sense that the Church and contemporary society had grown too far apart. One of the pivotal documents that resulted from Vatican II is Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), which was intended to illuminate the Church’s role in modern secular society. For some, Gaudium et Spes had immediate and radical consequences: it meant that the Church’s focus should shift from the universal to the local; that it should not repudiate modernity but should find a way of adapting to it; and that it should not simply be involved in charity for the poor but should also be proactive in addressing the causes of social and economic injustices around the world. By the end of the 1960s, however, important figures, notably the future Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, concluded that this reading of Vatican II compromised the Church’s specifically spiritual mission with worldly ideologies like Marxism, and that true revitalization required a return to the purity of the early Church.
When Ouellet chose to write his doctoral dissertation on Hans Urs von Balthasar, widely regarded as the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, he was allying himself with this call to the original sources of the Church. Over the course of more than 100 books, von Balthasar endeavoured to articulate a space for religious experience within modern life, weighing in on some of the Church’s most controversial issues. He argued against ordaining female priests, because doing so would compromise the role of Mary as a tender, compassionate presence through whom Christ could be experienced; and for priestly celibacy, on the grounds that the role required a radical openness to Christ, inconsistent with having other priorities. For von Balthasar, Christ is central to the notion of what it means to be a person, and therefore the figure of Christ (and the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) is crucial to every aspect of an authentic life. It should come as no surprise that this resonated with Ouellet, who had always seen his calling as principally contemplative.
But becoming one of the world’s leading specialists on the thought of von Balthasar also provided Ouellet with an introduction into an elite, conservative Vatican intellectual circle that included two former professors: Ratzinger and John Paul II. Ouellet was an active contributor to Communio, the conservative theological journal founded by von Balthasar, Ratzinger, and the great French thinker Henri Lubac; eventually, Ouellet taught at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute, acted as a consultant to the Congregation for the Clergy, and served as secretary to the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. By then, he was widely viewed as being groomed for even higher positions, and he was: in 2002, John Paul II called him to become archbishop of Quebec.
he Quebec Ouellet returned to was almost unrecognizable. With the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, which he had spent in the relative isolation of the seminary, the Catholic Church no longer controlled the educational system, and church membership had plummeted from 99 percent in the late 1950s to 16 percent by 1990. The pill and abortion were legal, marriage was in decline and divorce on the rise, and the birth rate was low. Like the rest of Canada, Quebec was flooded with immigrants, many of them Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists; it was no longer even remotely a homogeneous society. “We [Catholics] had never fought for our faith, because it was always part of our culture,” says Ouellet, “so at the time we didn’t fight for our faith, and I think we lost our balance. From a religious point of view, Quebec is a disaster.”As the archbishop of Quebec and the primate of Canada (he was promoted to cardinal in 2003, giving him a vote in the election of the pope), he had the authority to make some changes. “I tried to take public positions, saying the government was very left wing, with a project for marginalizing the Church,” he says. He also challenged what he saw as lax practices within the clergy. One of his first acts after he returned to Quebec was to reverse the practice of communal absolution, common across the province partly because there were not enough priests, in favour of the more traditional individual confession. He hardly did so unilaterally — he went out to his dioceses and consulted with the priests — but, as Bishop Gérald Cyprien Lacroix, who was recently appointed to replace Ouellet as archbishop, says, “It’s one thing to consult, another to make a decision,” and feathers were inevitably ruffled. Members of the Quebec priesthood were set in their ways and resistant to change, especially when it came from an outsider. “People saw me as a man from Rome,” Ouellet says, “but really I was a man from Jerusalem.”
The response among the clergy to his pronouncements on communal absolution was, however, nothing compared with the public reaction to his statements on marriage, family, and education. In his fourth and most important book thus far, Divine Resemblance: Marriage and Family in the Mission of the Church, he argues that marriage between a man and a woman is a sacrament that participates in the Trinity, and whose underlying purpose is the creation of families. Needless to say, he stridently opposes both abortion and same-sex marriage. In a speech he gave at the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in July 2003, six months into his tenure in Quebec, he stated, “One pregnancy in four ends in abortion. This is truly a disaster that one must avoid, not only out of respect for life, but also out of compassion for these distraught women who pay a heavy price for a decision made in haste.” While his views echo official Church doctrine, they are also clearly heartfelt, with not a small hint of nostalgia for his upbringing in rural Quebec. “There used to be these big families with five or six children,” he comments. “People don’t do that now. It takes faith to have children, and people don’t have it anymore.”
While there are certainly those in Quebec who find his version of the faith liberating — “Cardinal Ouellet has made me less afraid of speaking the truth,” Lacroix told me — his coverage in the press, notably Le Devoir and La Presse, has been almost invariably negative if not outright hostile, accusing him of wanting to return what had become a relatively affluent, progressive, multicultural province to the backward days before the Quiet Revolution. Prominent scholars like Gilles Routhier, an ordained priest and a professor of theology at Laval University, regard Ouellet’s approach as both delusional and destructive. “He is a man with an idea of truth that is abstract,” explains Routhier, “and that’s a problem. When he deals with history and it doesn’t correspond with his ideals, he thinks he can condemn it or destroy it or change it. I think he wanted to refound the Church here, to start it from zero, but you can’t do that.”
he Mass at the Quebec City Cathedral on the day after Christmas is not nearly as crowded as the one on Christmas Eve, but still there are young parents and children everywhere, bundled up against the damp cold. After Mass, at the front of the cathedral, Archbishop Lacroix, in full priestly robes, has one child on his lap and is surrounded by several more who are re-enacting the Nativity. It is a beautiful, innocent scene. Yet watching Lacroix bouncing the children on his knees, it is impossible to think about anything except the sexual abuse scandal.Lacroix is of course acutely aware of the tragic irony of this, especially in Quebec, where the Church may have a contentious history of political and social dominance not unlike the one it has in Ireland, but where there has yet to be a major sexual abuse scandal. In fact, many of Ouellet’s successes in the province involved energizing its youth: the 2007 International Eucharistic Congress, set to coincide with Quebec City’s 400th anniversary, was partly organized by young people and was attended by more than 25,000 faithful from around the world; the annual Diocesan Youth Day and conference are increasingly well attended; and Ouellet himself founded two new seminaries in Quebec City. Still, the bitterness many feel toward the Church runs deep. Websites have sprung up that help people write “letters of apostasy” to their dioceses, revoking the validity of their baptisms and disassociating them from the Church. At the Quebec City airport, I stopped to chat with an older woman, and when I told her I had been there doing research for an article on Cardinal Ouellet, her immediate reaction was “The bastards!”
On top of everything else — the abuse, and the failure to address it — the public now wants a response from the Church that it is not getting. Standing at the foot of the stairs leading to Casa di Santa Marta’s residences after our interview, Ouellet remarks, “I had to decide whether I would make an exception and meet with you, or whether you just wanted to ask the seven questions every other reporter asks.” I hadn’t asked those seven questions, because I already knew the answers: Ouellet will see to it that the Church has strong bishops who possess great integrity and can maintain tight control over the priests in their dioceses, and who can be trusted to immediately turn over credible complaints to the secular authorities.
