Gérald Cyprien Lacroix had been the Archbishop of Quebec and Primate of Canada since his appointment by Pope Benedict XVI on 22 February 2011 and became a cardinal in 2014. He has been accused in Canada of sexually assaulting a female teenager. The accusation is part of a class action lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Quebec for some of its institutional abuse and coverup, which goes back to the earliest presence of the Church in Quebec. The current class action suit was initially filed in 2022.
Lacroix, age 66, claims that he is innocent but has temporarily stepped down. Another Canadian cardinal, Marc Ouellet, was also accused and stepped down last year from his position. They join more than 100 priests who have been named as abusers that the diocese aided and abetted, which is believed by many to be the tip of the iceberg since more than 90% of victims have never come forward.
Catholic Quebec has a long history of atrocities committed by the Church against children that are nothing less than Satanic in nature. Not only has the sexual abuse of children been the norm, but children have also been subjected to a wide range of other horrific abuse on a wholesale level.
One of the most shocking cases is that of the Duplessis Orphans. Up until the 1960s, children born out of wedlock in Quebec were forcibly taken from their mothers and put into mostly Catholic run orphanages. When the church figured out that it could more than double the amount it received for the children's care if they classified them as mentally ill, it quickly diagnosed some 22,000 orphans as "mentally retarded" and called the orphanages psychiatric hospitals. The corrupt church-run government supported the scam 100%.
The treatment that the children received was horrific and tortuous. The lucky ones were rented out Catholic businesses as child slave labor, others were used as lab rats to test pharmaceuticals and terminal Naziesque medical experiments for the CIA's MK Ultra and other sadistic programs. Electro-shock and lobotomies were routine.
Most all the children were physically, sexually and psychologically abused and tortured. None were given any education or actual psychiatric treatment. Those who survived till age 18 were simply released, most too damaged to function in society and with no support. The bodies of many of the children murdered by the Nuns who ran the hell-holes were sold to medical supply houses and some used for med-school pathology classes.
Orphan Marc Boudreau described his childhood as hell and said, "I was abused mentally, psychologically, from all points of view. I was abused sexually. I was beaten. I also lost an eye."
The government was sued in the 1990s and dragged the case out for many years while waiting for most of the remaining victims to die. It finally settled but only offered the survivors each $25k while the attorneys involved all got millions. 100% of the cost was passed on to taxpayers. The church and the monsters who inflicted the insane abuse were never held accountable.
In 1999, researchers Léo-Paul Lauzon and Martin Poirier issued a report demonstrating that both the Quebec provincial government and the Catholic Church made substantial profits by fraudulently branding thousands of Quebec orphans as mentally ill. Their conservative estimate was that religious groups received $70 million in subsidies (in 1999 dollars) while the government saved $37 million simply by having one of its orphanages reclassified from an educational institution to a psychiatric hospital.
In 2004, some of the few surviving Duplessis orphans petitioned the Quebec government to excavate an abandoned cemetery in Montreal believed to hold the remains of children subjected to sadistic and often lethal experiments. After the government repeatedly refused, the orphans made their case before the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2010, which failed to move the government. And in 2018 another class-action lawsuit was filed which has been consistently blocked by Canada's corrupt court system.
The mass graves of the bodies that weren't sold have yet to be investigated.
Quebec remains a heavily Catholic province with loyal parishioners continuing to mindlessly support the Church and its institutional abuse. In other provinces, church attendance has plummeted and dozens of churches have been burned to the ground as a small measure of justice against the centuries of abuse that they represented. Dozens more are waiting silently to be razed.