A French civil court has ordered Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the former head of the Dicastery for Bishops, and the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Spirit to pay more than €200,000 in material and moral damages to a nun named Mother Marie Ferréol.
The nun, Sabine Baudin de la Valette by her baptismal name, argued that she was expelled from the traditionalist group’s abbey “without reason” after 34 years.
The judgment adds to the judicial problems for the cardinal, who faces two accusations of sexual abuse in his native Québec. He denies them.
Two apostolic visitors Ouellet sent to investigate Ferréol’s case – Benedictine Abbot Jean-Charles Nault and Cistercian Abbess Emmanuelle Desjobert – were also fined.
The Vatican decided to investigate the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Spirit after a decade of disputes in the small community in Berné, along the Atlantic coast in Brittany.
Ferréol, 57, was expelled in 2020 following the visitation and taken by night to the female monastery at Solesmes near Le Mans. She was vaguely accused of being manipulative, critical and “repeatedly attacking the truth”, though the group stresses it was not “a question of moral”.
Hearing the expulsion left Ferréol without means or lodging, the court in Lorient criticised the Vatican for not saying explicitly why she was evicted. The visitors’ lawyer said the court had no right to examine a canonical dossier.
Personal differences and clashing interpretations of Thomist writings are reportedly behind the dispute between Ferréol and her equally strong-willed superior, Mother Marie of the Assumption, a theologian and colleague of Cardinal Ouellet.
Pope Francis intervened in a 2021 letter to the group, apologising for a lack of supervision in the previous decade – under the now-disbanded Ecclesia Dei commission – and saying the dossier was now in Ouellet’s hands.
The Canadian-born cardinal, who stepped down as dicastery head in January 2023, also faces two accusations of inappropriate sexual behaviour by women in Québec.
Cardinal Gérald Cyprien Lacroix, Ouellet’s successor as Archbishop of Québec, has been included in the same class action lawsuit on clerical sexual abuse as Ouellet. He also denies the accusation.
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