Posted on 10/21/2003 10:14:01 AM PDT by dangus
Also, the odds are long that ANY North American would EVER be elected to the Papacy, for political reasons.
(And, Lord deliver us from anybody of French ancestry.)
Found the following article to be fairly clear in its portrayal of Cardinal Marc Ouellet. From GlobeandMail.com
Archbishop Marc Ouellet, a Quebecker with traditionalist views and close ties to Pope John Paul II, was among 31 men the ailing pontiff appointed cardinal Sunday, joining the select group that one day will elect the Pope's successor.
Archbishop Ouellet, who leads the Quebec City diocese, is a respected theologian who was the highest-ranking Canadian cleric during his stint at the Vatican. Canada has two other cardinals, Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic of Toronto and Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte of Montreal.
Laboriously announced by John Paul from his window overlooking St. Peter's Square, the appointments are a further and possibly final touch of the 83-year-old pontiff's already great influence on the College of Cardinals. The nominations come a month before the church celebrates the 25th year of John Paul's papacy.
The pontiff has named all but five of the cardinals who are under age 80 and therefore eligible to elect his successor. There are now either 135 or 136 voting cardinals, depending on the age of one of Sunday's appointments, whose name wasn't disclosed.
Such confidentiality often indicates that the new cardinal lives in a country where the church isn't welcome, and there was speculation that the secret appointee could be from China. Others suggested it could also be Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Pope's private secretary.
Archbishop Ouellet, a Sulpician priest, has impeccable academic credentials but less experience as a pastor. He is an expert on Hans Urs von Balthasar, a conservative theologian the Pope greatly admires.
Supporters maintain it is simplistic to label Archbishop Ouellet's beliefs as conservative.
Nevertheless, in less than a year as archbishop in Quebec City, leading the so-called mother church of all dioceses north of Mexico, Archbishop Ouellet has made headlines with his forceful calls for a return to a larger role for the Roman Catholic Church.
"Quebec is languishing, far from the values that were the strength and glory of her forebears," he said at his Jan. 26 installation, in a homily that warned against "the idolatry of money, sex and the power of the media."
The province's low birth rate and its high number of teen suicides are "the sign of the gravest deficiency now ailing Quebec society: forgetting its spiritual heritage, its martyrs and its saints," he added in that speech.
In an another address, made before the Assembly of Quebec Bishops last March, he said the church shouldn't shy away from stating its views on marriage, considering "the massive influence" of the media on lawmakers and "the spectacular gains" of special-interest groups.
Marriage has a divine origin and is "by nature a social institution created by God to propagate the human species," he argued.
While he has expressed sympathy for gay people, "socially, you cannot place homosexual unions and the family on the same footing, otherwise you are touching at a most intimate fibre of our identity," he said in an interview with Le Soleil newspaper in January.
In another controversial interview with the same daily, he criticized school teachers for what he called their "Marxist" approach to education, holding them responsible for young people's "wretched ignorance" about Roman Catholicism.
As the second-in-command at the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity from 2001 until last year, Archbishop Ouellet has had opportunities to practise his diplomacy in the ecumenical world.
He has recalled how he worried — needlessly, it turned out — about offending Greek Orthodox officials visiting the Vatican who were shown relics pilfered from Constantinople by the Crusaders.
The Western Catholic Reporter weekly recounted how he got a standing ovation for his tactful manners during a conference for interchurch families in 1999.
The new cardinal-in-waiting said Sunday that he was so surprised when the papal nuncio told him of his selection that he asked him to repeat it. He said he then prayed in gratitude.
The third of a family of eight children from small-town Abitibi, he is a well-travelled 59-year-old who speaks French, English, Spanish, German and Italian. Although he has been rector at St. Joseph's Seminary in Edmonton and at Montreal's Grand Seminary, he has spent large parts of his life overseas, studying in Europe, teaching in Colombia and working at the Vatican.
The consistory, the installation ceremony where the new cardinals will receive their emblematic red hat, is to take place Oct. 21, during celebrations of the 25th year of John Paul II's papacy.
This is my kind of guy!
I would bet the Archdiocese of New York might have something to say about this.
The same Hans Urs von Balthasar who said "we can all pray that there are no souls in hell."
This sort of data keeps cropping up in the Cardinal stories. Our Cardinal Rigali is one of seven.
Sinky, NY is a johnny-come-lately diocese. The Primatial See of America is Baltimore. Quebec beats out Baltimore north of the Rio Grande, and Mexico City (I think) trumps for the whole continent and hemisphere.
Conservative in the sense that yesterday's radical is today's standard bearer. I think this is code meaning he doesn't disagree with Church teaching on abortion, wymyn priestesses, contraception, sodomy, etc.
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