MONTREAL — The Harper government distanced itself Monday from anti-abortion remarks by one of Canada’s most prominent religious leaders that have caused an uproar.
Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Josee Verner described the comments by Marc Ouellet — a Catholic cardinal once touted as a possible candidate for the papacy — as “unacceptable.”
The controversy was triggered when the Quebec City cardinal called abortion a moral crime in every case, even in the case of rape victims.
The comments from Ouellet come with the abortion issue, long dormant in national politics, suddenly heating up again.
Over the weekend, Ouellet applauded the Harper government for its stance against funding abortions in the developing world.
But Verner moved Monday to distance her government from the remarks.
“The government did not put forward the agenda for maternal and child health (at the G8) to go get congratulations from the cardinal,” Verner said. “I don’t want to be disrespectful towards him, but this wasn’t our objective.”
Verner described herself as pro-choice, and she offered a very curt assessment of Ouellet’s weekend remarks: “It’s unacceptable.”
Quebec’s airwaves and cyberspace were aflame with far more extensive commentary Monday.
The Ouellet remarks quickly became one of the country’s top trending topics on Twitter.
In one particularly virulent reaction, a Montreal La Presse columnist expressed his wish that Ouellet would die a slow and painful death.
Columnist Patrick Lagace compared Ouellet to the Iranian imam, Kazem Sedighi, who recently suggested scantily-clad women were to blame for natural disasters. The column was titled, The Scorn of Kazem Ouellet.
“We’re all going to die,” Lagace wrote. “Cardinal Ouellet will die someday. I hope he dies from a long and painful illness. . .
“Yes, the paragraph I’ve just written is vicious. But Marc Ouellet is an extremist. And in the debate against religious extremists, every hit is fair game.”
A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Quebec City says Ouellet was simply stating Church doctrine when a reporter asked him about rape and abortion.
The National Catholic Reporter cited Ouellet, in 2005, on a list of about 20 candidates considered possible replacements for the late John Paul II.
On the weekend, Ouellet was speaking to an audience of about 200 people when he applauded the Harper government’s G8 move and added, with respect to rape: “Why should we push a woman who has been the victim of a crime to commit one of her own?”
In an exchange with reporters later he said:
“I understand very well that a woman who’s been raped is dealing with trauma and that she needs to be helped. But she needs to do so with respect for the being that is in her womb. It is not responsible for what happened. It’s the rapist who is responsible. But there’s already a victim. Do we we need to have another one?”