Quebec Victims' Group Backs Ouellet As Pope, Contrary to Other Groups Who Have 'Blacklisted' Him
By Allison Lampert
MONTREAL — On a chilly winter day in 2010, France Bédard led a picket demanding Cardinal Marc Ouellet’s resignation for not seriously addressing victims’ claims of abuse by Quebec clerics.
Today, she’d like to see him elected pope.
As founder of the Quebec Association of Victims of Priests, Bédard is to announce on Sunday the group’s support for Cardinal Ouellet becoming pontiff, during a protest against abuses by the Catholic Church held outside the Clercs de Saint-Viateur offices in Outremont.
Contrary to other groups that have “blacklisted” hometown born Ouellet, 68, the association believes his election as the first Canadian pontiff would thrust the stories of abuse recounted by its 3,500 members into the international spotlight, with reporters already descending on the Cardinal’s tiny hometown of La Motte.
“We are not being facetious, we are all for his election as pope,” Carlo Tarini, the association’s spokesperson told The Gazette. “What we hope they (journalists) will note is the No. 1 problem with the Catholic Church, which is the problem of pedophile priests. We want them to hear our claim that Quebec is a paradise for pedophile priests and how we knocked at (Ouellet’s) door in the past.
“We want to raise awareness and we’re fed up with the empty lies.”
The protest comes at a time when Ouellet has emerged as a serious contender for the papacy, with Tuesday marking the beginning of the conclave to elect a new pope to represent the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
Earlier this week, a U.S.-based victims’ rights association included Ouellet as part of a group of clergy it referred to as the “dirty dozen,” after a 1967 Second World War film, news reports said. The group, which later apologized for offending Catholics, said Ouellet was included on the list for refusing to meet with alleged church sex-abuse victims.
This week, Quebec City’s Catholic Diocese fired back, claiming the media were being unfairly negative in their reporting on the papal contender.
But on the same day, another case emerged to embarrass the church establishment, when the Quebec priest Father Daniel Moreau was charged with possession and distribution of child pornography in Sorel-Tracy, located about 100 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
Bédard, 65, has a $325,000 lawsuit pending over her alleged rape by the late vicar Armand Therrien in 1965, when she was a 17-year-old housekeeper at the presbytery de Saint-Marc-des-Carrières. She became pregnant with Therrien’s child.
“I was more like a 12-year-old than the 17-year-olds you’d see today,” she recalled. “I was very innocent. I had no sexual experience at all.”
The association she founded represents alleged victims of clergy abuse from three main groups: children who claim to have been raped at the Séminaire Saint Alphonse at Ste-Anne de Beaupré, the Duplessis Orphans, who were wrongly institutionalized church-run asylums, and alleged survivors of abuse when they were deaf children being taught by priests from the Saint Viateur order.
“Can you imagine anything worse than the abuse of a young handicapped, completely vulnerable child,” Bédard asked. “Parents couldn’t accept that a representative of God could be like this.”
In 2012, Ouellet apologized in the name of the Church to survivors of abuse by clerics in Ireland and to seek “God’s forgiveness for the times clerics have sexually abused children not only in Ireland but anywhere in the Church,” Vatican Radio reported.
“We have learned over the last decades how much harm and despair such abuse caused to thousands of victims. We learned, too, that the response of some Church authorities to these crimes was often inadequate and inefficient in stopping the crimes, in spite of clear indications in the code of canon law,” he was quoted as saying.
But while Ouellet apologized in 2007 on behalf of the Church for anti-Semitism, natives, and discrimination against women and homosexuals in Canada, news reports said, no requests for forgiveness were made to victims of sexual abuse by clerics in Quebec, Tarini said.
Over the years, Bédard said she sent repeated letters to Ouellet asking the Cardinal to act and remove priests proved to have committed acts of pedophilia and other kinds of sexual abuse.
“I have written to you on several occasions, without ever receiving a response,” Bédard wrote in 2008. “Your silence in this situation is inexplicable.”
With the Church losing influence in modern day Quebec, having a Quebec-born pontiff is the best hope for the alleged victims that Bédard’s association represents to obtain financial compensation from the Church.
“We realize now that is the only way these three cases will be swiftly addressed by Church authorities,” Tarini said. “What the victims need is not prayer but compensation.”
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