Quebec cardinal never dreamed mission area would be his home province
May 09, 2008
When Cardinal Marc Ouellet became a priest in 1968, he dreamed of becoming a missionary.
QUEBEC CITY (CNS, May-7-2008) -- Instead of work in a far-off jungle or city slum, Cardinal Ouellet hoped to be a "missionary to priests." He joined the Sulpicians, an order that specializes in priestly formation.
His vision did not include becoming archbishop of Quebec and primate of Canada. Nor did he ever imagine his home province as his mission field.
Yet he sees in his life a continuity "on that line of missionary," especially as he prepares to host the 2008 International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec City June 15-22.
"I could not have been better prepared to do what I'm doing," he said. His theological reflections over the past 10 years have involved a deepening of sacramental theology, specifically marriage and the Eucharist, and developing "an awareness of fundamental importance of the Eucharist as the ground of the church."
He expressed hope that the congress will reawaken all of North America to its Christian roots, because it coincides with the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City, the gateway to the continent's evangelization.
Born in 1944, the third of eight children, Cardinal Ouellet grew up on a farm outside La Motte, a small village in Quebec's western Abitibi region. His mother was only 18 when she married. His father, largely self-taught, found various ways to provide for his large family. The Ouellets kept a cow or two and a flock of sheep. Though never hungry, the family was relatively poor.
While attending a school run by the Clerics of Saint-Viateur in Berthierville, Cardinal Ouellet began to consider if God was calling him.
"It was a very Catholic institution. It was normal there to be invited to join the community or to think about possible vocations," he said. "I remember, at 14 years old, the question of vocation was very much alive in me but undecided."
His father had different ideas. He brought him home to attend public school in Amos, where Cardinal Ouellet took courses to become a teacher. His paternal grandfather, who guessed Cardinal Ouellet's vocation before he did, helped him choose courses that would prepare him for the major seminary in Montreal.
Cardinal Ouellet loved sports and looked forward to playing hockey every winter. When he was 17, he broke his leg and missed a season. The decreased mobility resulted in a period of reflection and deepened prayer. At the same time, his study of science, philosophy and literature awakened deep questions.
Studying astronomy, the immensity of the universe and the velocity of light deeply impressed him.
"I was reflecting on God and creation and our position in the universe and at the same time on what would be my role in life," he said.
He began to read books by St. Francis de Sales and others and said the spiritual autobiography of St. Therese of the Child Jesus greatly influenced him.
"My deep motivation for becoming a priest was spiritual and intellectual and a search for the truth," he said. "I wanted to consecrate my life to something important, dealing with the meaning of life."
That led him to study theology and philosophy.
In 1968, Cardinal Ouellet was ordained in the same village church where he had been baptized and confirmed. He then served two years in Val-d'Or as a parish priest, with an eye on joining the Society of St. Sulpice.
In 1970, the Sulpicians sent him to Colombia to test how he might perform as a missionary in a seminary. He arrived in South America not knowing any Spanish, but he mastered the language within a few months. After a year and a half in Colombia, Cardinal Ouellet joined the Sulpicians in 1972. He then went to Rome for further studies in philosophy.
It was during these studies that he came across the work of Father Hans Urs von Balthazar, a contemporary Catholic theologian whose theology "fascinated" him with its mystical dimension. They struck up a friendship that lasted until Father von Balthazar's death in 1988. Cardinal Ouellet described him as his chief mentor.
Father von Balthazar was among several Catholic theologians who proposed refocusing the church on Christ and returning to patristic sources and their mode of theology.
"The Catholic Church needed a very strong recentering on Christ, which was exactly the event of the Second Vatican Council," Cardinal Ouellet said. It involved "getting out of the mess of rationalism, which has been a sort of poison for modern theology."
Cardinal Ouellet said he feels the number of Catholics in Quebec decreased after the Second Vatican Council because of a rupture or discontinuity with the church's tradition.
"This has been a big problem in Canada, in Quebec in particular, where the hermeneutic of discontinuity has been applied," he said. Many in Canada worry that the spirit of the council has been lost and needs to be recovered because the reforms have not gone far enough, he said.
Cardinal Ouellet said he shares Pope Benedict XVI's view that the council was in continuity with the church and tradition.
"We are still receiving the Spirit and the letter of the Second Vatican Council," he said, and his own theological work has been in that vein.
Cardinal Ouellet served in Colombia again after his studies in Rome. In 1990, he returned to Canada to serve as rector at seminaries in Montreal and Edmonton, Alberta. From 1996 to 2001 he taught in Rome at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Pontifical Lateran University.
In 2001, Pope John Paul ordained him a bishop and appointed him secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
"It was a big surprise to me," he said. "I was not prepared for that." He was told he would "learn on the spot."
"For me it was a school of openness to other realities, church realities," he said. He worked with the World Council of Churches in Geneva, worked on the Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue, and traveled to India to visit with the Orthodox there. He described it as an extraordinary time of discovery.
"I was starting to say, OK, now I start to know where I was to go, then I was -- poof! -- sent here to be archbishop of Quebec," he said. He was installed in 2002 and received his cardinal's red hat within a year.
Cardinal Ouellet's five years in Quebec have had controversial moments. Critics viewed him as a conservative that Rome imposed on the Quebec church to bring it back in line. Soon after his arrival he faced protests from his priests when he abolished the routine practice of collective absolution. He admitted the "huge reaction" was painful, but once the decision was made the priests obeyed.
The news media also have criticized Cardinal Ouellet for blaming Quebec's social ills on the collapse of Catholicism and publicly lamenting the spiritual void left from the 1970s, when Quebec's church attendance fell. Now the province has the highest rate of children born out of wedlock, a low birthrate and a high suicide rate.
But Cardinal Ouellet said the difficulty of the mission in the world has been less painful than the "search for unity within the church."
"This has always been the main challenge and the most difficult," he said, although he recognizes the conflict is nothing unusual. "That's the normal state of mission, where you go forward with the cross of Jesus Christ. That's exactly his way, and you cannot go forward without going the same way."
Quebec cardinal never dreamed mission area would be his home province