Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Canadian-born head of the Dicastery for Bishops, has denied a second accusation of sexual abuse of a young woman dating back to his 2003-2010 period as Archbishop of Québec.
The lay Catholic magazine Golias Hebdo in France said the accusation was made in a letter to the Québec archdiocese in 2020. As in the first case, the avowed victim was told the Vatican found no reason to pursue the case.
The cardinal, 78, denied last month a first accusation against him, also by a Quebec woman, and filed a defamation suit against her.
“I have nothing to hide,” Ouellet said in a statement after the second accusation, according to Radio Canada in French.
“I deny having committed any reprehensible behaviour with regard to this woman.”
Golias Hebdo did not make clear the nature of the purported abuse.
On 13 January, the first woman to accuse Ouellet, until then identified only as “F”, revealed herself to the media as the former 23-year-old trainee pastoral worker who made the accusation.
Now 38, Pamela Groleau told journalists she feared for her job after joining a class-action lawsuit in August that accused about 80 priests of the Québec archdiocese, including Cardinal Ouellet, of past sexual abuse.
As soon as the archdiocesan committee on abuse learned the senior Vatican official was among those named, “the committee asked me to write to His Holiness”, she said.
She was told the Ouellet case required a canonical inquiry but nobody at the archdiocese could tell her what that meant. Both avowed victims said the inquiries were superficial but intimidating, according to Golias Hebdo.
Groleau accused Cardinal Ouellet of inappropriately touching, kissing and pressing against her and making inappropriate comments on several occasions.
According to Canadian media, the cardinal’s latest statement said the second accuser, referred to by the pseudonym “Marie”, had refused to meet with Church officials investigating her complaint and had apparently had not asked for the case to be reopened.
Unlike the first accuser, she was not among the signatories of the collective abuse complaint against the Québec archdiocese.
Cardinal Ouellet said he cooperated with the inquiries and faced neither canonical nor civil charges. If he wins the defamation case against Groleau, any funds awarded him would be donated to efforts to fight sexual abuse of indigenous people in Canada.
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