Marc Armand Ouellet (; born 8 June 1944) is a Canadian Catholic prelate who served as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America from 2010 to 2023. He is a member of the Sulpicians.
Ouellet served as Archbishop of Quebec and Primate of Canada from 2003 to 2010. He was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II on 21 October 2003 and was considered a possible candidate for election to the papacy in 2005, 2013 and 2025.
He spent his early career as a priest from 1972 to 2001 developing his credentials as a theologian and working as a seminary teacher and administrator in Canada, Colombia, and Rome. He also served briefly in the Roman Curia from 2001 to 2003.
Early life
Ouellet was born on 8 June 1944 into a Catholic family of eight children in La Motte, Quebec, the third son of Pierre Ouellet (1919-1988) and Graziella Michaud (1922-2015). His father, Pierre, was a farmer who was self-taught, and later director-general of the area's school board. Ouellet attended Mass at Église Saint-Luc (now a community centre) regularly with his family. Ouellet later described his family as religious but not very devout. His childhood interests included reading, ice hockey, hunting partridge, and fishing. One of his summer jobs was fighting forest fires. While recovering from a hockey injury at age 17, he read Thérèse of Lisieux and started a more focused search for meaning. Although his father was reluctant to see his son become a priest, Ouellet while still a teenager informed him he had made a firm decision.
Career
He studied at the Major Seminary of Montreal from 1964 to 1969, earning a licentiate in theology. He was ordained a priest on 25 May 1968. Boucher pleaded guilty in 2019 to charges of sex abuse. then rector of St. Joseph's Seminary in Edmonton in 1994. From 1996 to 2002 he held the chair in dogmatic theology at the John Paul II Institute for the Study of Marriage and the Family, then part of the Pontifical Lateran University. It was published in part as L'anthropologie théologique de Hans Urs von Balthasar the same year. Pope John Paul II consecrated him a bishop on 19 March 2001 in St. Peter's Basilica. On 12 June 2001 he was named a consultor to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Archbishop of Quebec
On 15 November 2002, Pope John Paul II appointed him Archbishop of Quebec. He was installed there on 26 January 2003. In that post he became a spokesman for the Catholic Church on all the public policy questions of the day. On 12 July 2005, Ouellet testified on behalf of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops before the Senate of Canada. He urged senators to vote against legalising same-sex marriage, referring to it as a "pseudo-marriage, a fiction".
On 21 November 2007, in a letter published in Quebec French-language newspapers, Ouellet apologized for what he described as past "errors" of the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec. Among the errors he wrote about were attitudes, prior to 1960, which promoted "anti-Semitism, racism, indifference to First Nations and discrimination against women and homosexuals."
In October 2008, Ouellet was sharply critical of a required course newly instituted in Quebec's schools Ethics and religious culture, established as part of a program to eliminate sectarianism from public education.