National Post (National Edition)
Vatican spokesman’s alleged plagiarism is more than cheating
Allegations that Fr. Thomas Rosica has engaged in serial plagiarism for more than a decade come as a shock.
The Canadian priest is the CEO of Salt and Light, a Catholic media outlet based in Toronto, a widely published writer and a former university president who currently sits on the boards of several institutions of higher learning. He is also known worldwide as the man who interprets the Vatican for the English-speaking media. In a 2015 profile, The Globe and Mail described him as one of Rome’s “most effective communications gurus.”
The first allegation appeared on Feb. 15, when Dorothy Cummings McLean published a news story for LifeSiteNews, a conservative Catholic media site, suggesting Rosica had plagiarized several sources in a speech at Cambridge University earlier this month.
That story led others — myself included — to examine some of Rosica’s other writing more carefully. Matthew Schmitz, senior editor of prominent religion journal First Things, took to Twitter to identify several blog posts and a speech that showed evidence of extensive plagiarism. In one case, 12 paragraphs had been lifted from the National Catholic Register.
“Really, the plagiarism by ( Rosica) appears to be endless,” Schmitz tweeted. “I can’t recall seeing a more extreme case.”
I turned my attention to the Canadian press, examining a sample of commentary pieces Rosica had written for newspapers — including the National Post — between 2003 and 2016. I was distressed to find clear indications of extensive plagiarism, the most recent a piece in The Globe and Mail from March 18, 2016. It includes, without credit, a summary of Pope Francis’s teachings on mercy by Michiko Kakutani from The New York Times.
Kakutani had written: “Mercy is essential because all men are sinners, in need of God’s forgiveness and grace, and it’s especially necessary today, at a time when ‘ humanity is wounded,’ suffering from ‘ the many slaveries of the third millennium’ — not just war and poverty and social exclusion, but also fatalism, hardheartedness and selfrighteousness.”
Rosica changes the word “men” to “people” and repeats the rest verbatim. In the same article, he also repeats, without credit, sections of text from a 2014 Washington Post article by E. J. Dionne Jr.
In a 2013 piece for The Windsor Star, Rosica not only borrows extensively from other reporters but removes quotation marks from a sentence attributed to Pope Francis — giving the impression that the words are his own.
Rosica has now apologized. And it is inevitable that he will face professional consequences.
He is a member of Toronto’s University of St. Michael College’s governing Collegium. He is also a board member at Texas’ University of St. Thomas in Houston, as well as a member of the the Board of Trustees of St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y. He formerly served as president and vice-chancellor at Assumption University in Windsor, Ont.
On Feb. 19, when the extent of the plagiarism was still coming to light, the USMC expressed its concern. “We are troubled to hear of the allegations against Fr. Thomas Rosica,” they said in a statement to LifeSiteNews. “The University of St. Michael’s College holds its students and its academic community to the highest standards of accountability and academic integrity.”
It is difficult to imagine how he will be able to continue serving with any educational institution now that he has acknowledged the accuracy of these reports of plagiarism.
Honestly, I wish none of the allegations were true. The Christian media community in Canada is rather small, and while I don’t know Rosica personally, I’ve always appreciated the work he has done helping the public at large to better understand Catholic teachings and news. I had the pleasure of hearing him speak several years ago at a Canadian Church Press conference, and I enjoyed what he had to say. He seems to be a very intelligent, very winsome communicator.
But that’s also why the revelation of his extensive and repeated plagiarism is so disheartening. Whether we know him or not, many of us in Canada’s Christian media have long considered him an example of how to do Christian communications well. That confidence is now broken.
As a Christian, Rosica would know that plagiarism — passing off another person’s words and work as our own — is a sin. I am grateful that he has made public acknowledgement of that sin. And I pray that through repentance he will find comfort in the mercy and love of Jesus Christ, even as he must now deal with the earthly consequences of his actions. May God give him strength for this difficult task. Mathew Block (@mathewablock) is editor of The Canadian Lutheran magazine and communications manager for the International Lutheran Council.