Quebec Cardinal Ouellet, Catholic Primate of Canada, Wants to Revitalize Faith and Family

QUEBEC CITY, December 12, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) –  In a recent interview with Zenit news, Canada’s newly designated Cardinal, Marc Ouellet, indicated he sees in his native country “the great need of a new evangelization in the terms of John Paul II.”  He lamented that “Many of my brothers and sisters in the faith have lost knowledge of their own faith; they don’t practice anymore and even lost memory of that faith.” Noting especially, “My generation has not really transmitted the faith to their children. Some of the children are not even baptized. We see very few children in church on Sundays. . . . They have not learned anything about the Church. It really concerns me.”  The Cardinal sees the Catholic faith as being stronger in the United States, suggesting that perhaps having to fight for the faith heightened its appreciation.  “The culture there is a culture of free initiative, and the Catholics had to fight for their own faith, because they were living in a sort of supermarket of different beliefs—whereas in Quebec we had a Christian and Catholic society; everything was given and we took it for granted, and all of a sudden everything fell apart.”  However the Cardinal sees hope especially after World Youth Day in Toronto. He hopes to reawaken the spiritual patrimony of Christians in Canada and sees the key to doing so in the family.  “Therefore I see a great need of handing on the faith through the renewal of family life, a new understanding of marriage as the foundation of the family and of society, and also the importance of maintaining the school as a place where faith is transmitted … and the parish community [as a place] to develop a stronger catechesis.”  Reacting to the attack on the family in Canada the Cardinal said, “We are losing the sense of the difference between man and woman, the complementarity of the sexes. The culture is trying to suppress the difference of sexes as if being a woman or a man makes no difference. So the Church is reminding the world that the difference of the sexes is important, fundamental, and it even belongs to the vocation of man to image God, to give a reflection of the mystery of God—because in the divine Persons you have equality but you have also difference. If we want a true humanity, we need to accept the difference and to live out the difference in a love which is open to a third.”  In a moving depiction of his pastoral style with the youth and its similarity to that of Pope John Paul II, the Cardinal described a post-World Youth Day encounter he had with some 500 youth.  After walking 14 kilometers with them, celebrating the sacraments and teaching them about marriage, the Cardinal stayed with the youth at a riverside campfire until midnight.  See the full Zenit interview at:  https://zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=46048