Marc Armand Ouellet (French pronunciation: [maʁk welɛ]; 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.
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.
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. He became vicar at the Saint-Sauveur church in nearby Val-d'Or for 1968–70 and then began years of alternating seminary work with further studies. He taught philosophy in 1970–71 at the Major Seminary of Bogotá, Colombia, which was run by the Sulpicians. He joined the Sulpicians in 1972. At the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas Angelicum in Rome, he earned a license in philosophy in 1974. He returned to teaching at the Major Seminary of Manizales, Colombia, joining in its management as well and then performed those same roles at the Grand Séminaire de Montréal beginning in 1976. He studied dogmatic theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University beginning in 1978, earning a doctorate in 1983 with a thesis on Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Returning to Colombia in 1983, he taught at the Major Seminary of Cali and then served as rector of the Major Seminary of Manzinales from 1984 to 1989. He became rector of the Grand Séminaire de Montréal in 1990, 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.
In 1990 Ouellet joined the editorial board of the North American edition of Communio, a journal of Catholic theology established after the Second Vatican Council by "conservatives disappointed with some of the excesses that followed the Second Vatican Council". In 1995 he was appointed a consultor of the Congregation for the Clergy and in 1999 for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. He became known during his teaching years as "a devotee of Swiss Catholic theologican Hans Urs von Balthasar, a darling of the Catholic right", whose work was the subject of Ouellet's 1983 doctoral thesis.
Ouellet was named titular archbishop of Agropoli and secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity on 3 March 2001. 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.
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. He doubted that teachers could provide instruction with "complete neutrality" to "produce a new little Quebecer, pluralist, expert in interreligious relations and critical of all beliefs". He advocated the protection of Quebec's religious heritage, which he described as "a force for social integration much more effective than the abstract knowledge of a few simple notions about six or several religions".
At a rally against abortion in 2010, Ouellet said that abortions should not be performed in cases of pregnancy from rape, saying "But there is already a victim. Must there be another one?"
In May 2010 Ouellet stood by his comments that abortion is unjustifiable, even in the case of rape, and urged the federal government to help pregnant women keep their child. He said that "Governments are funding clinics for abortion. I would like equity for organizations that are defending also life. If we have equity in funding those instances to help women I think we would make lots of progress in Canada".
Having earlier applauded prime minister Stephen Harper's government for its stance against funding abortions in the developing world, he added: "If they do not want to fund abortion abroad and they do not bring at home more help to women to keep their child, I think they are incoherent".
On 21 October 2003, at the first consistory for creating cardinals following Ouellet's appointment to Quebec, Pope John Paul II made him a cardinal, assigning him as a cardinal priest to Santa Maria in Traspontina.
He was a cardinal elector in the 2005 papal conclave. Anticipating that gathering, John L. Allen writing in the National Catholic Reporter placed Ouellet among twenty candidates for the papacy. He noted Ouellet's attachment to traditional liturgical practices and a certain disaffection with developments since the Second Vatican Council, but said that "people who have worked with Ouellet describe him as friendly, humble and flexible, and a man not so captive to his own intellectual system as to make him incapable of listening to others." One account of the balloting said that Ouellet had supported Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI.
On 24 November 2003, Pope John Paul II named him a member of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and a consultor for the Pontifical Commission for Latin America. Pope Benedict XVI included him among the papal appointees to the 2005 Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist, one of eight members of the Council of Cardinals for the Study of Organizational and Economic Affairs of the Holy See on 3 February 2007, a member of the Congregation for Catholic Education on 24 May 2007, a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture on 8 February 2008, and a member of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America on 8 October 2009.
Ouellet was appointed relator-general (recording secretary) of the Synod of Bishops that met in October 2008 to consider "The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church". In his opening-day address he advocated for Biblical exegesis motivated by faith, not driven by the "superficial characteristics" explored in linguistic and archeological scholarship. He also called for reading scripture in the light of Church teaching; he lamented the "often unhealthy tension between university theology and the ecclesiastical magisterium."