How long until Pakistan or India step over the line?

The news, brought to a national audience in these pages last Saturday, that Canada’s most prominent media priest, Father Thomas Rosica, head of Salt & Light Television, has been plagiarizing for years in his published work came as a particular shock to me.

I have known Fr. Tom for nearly 20 years, and he has been good to me and my family. In the divisive pontificate of Pope Francis, where the disparagement of those who disagree begins in Rome and is amplified in the world of digital media, Fr. Tom and I have found ourselves on different sides often enough. He has applied his prodigious gifts to promoting the idea that Pope Francis represents an exhilarating break from Catholic tradition. I find such breaks alarming, so we have largely gone our separate ways lately. But it was not so under St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, where Fr. Tom and I happily collaborated on occasion.

I expect that will be the case in the future, or at least I hope it will be. The current pontificate is proving exhausting for all concerned, as the powers-that-be in Rome lash out at perceived enemies as they lurch from crisis to crisis. I am eager for these internecine battles to be set aside so we can get on with the work of evangelization.

But even across the divides that Pope Francis is deepening in the Church, I found the news of Fr. Tom’s plagiarism tragic and a blow for all Catholics. He is enormously intelligent and even more industrious; it is manifestly the case that he has no need to plagiarize to make a worthy contribution. But he did so, with examples perhaps stretching back as long as 25 years, perhaps even including his scholarly work.

How to explain that? My own suspicion is that Fr. Tom, always accepting demanding assignments with enough work for three men, cut a few corners here and there to maintain the pace he was keeping, with no malice aforethought. Carelessness then became something of a habit.

Nevertheless, it remains most serious. Fr. Tom has confessed his guilt, both publicly and privately, saying that the fault is his alone. In the university world, plagiarism is one of the few things not subject to moral relativism, and Fr. Tom has resigned from the three university boards that he sat on. The Canadian Jesuits — Fr. Tom is a member of another order, the Basilians — had planned to honour him later this spring and have withdrawn the planned award.

For journalists, plagiarism is also a serious crime. Fr. Tom doesn’t have a regular column, but his work has appeared widely, including in the National Post. I expect editors where he has appeared will take appropriate action and that his byline will not be as ubiquitous as it has been in recent years.

He does though run a Catholic television network. Not just as the CEO, but as the founder and animating spirit. The Latin is more accurate: he is the Salt & Light’s sine qua non. So I expect he will continue his work there, chastened and contrite.

The divisions fomented by Pope Francis mean that there will be many calling for Fr. Tom’s head, indulging in morose delectation — a sort of theological term for schadenfreude — that a key booster of Pope Francis has been besmirched.

Count me out. The Catholic Church in Canada does not have a surfeit of priests like Fr. Tom and we need him, in his own voice. And if that voice is now repentant and seeks mercy, as he should, that, too, can be a lesson at the service of the gospel.

Fr. Tom’s plagiarism revelations came during the Vatican’s sexual abuse summit, where he was serving on the official communications team. In that atmosphere, there is an understandable tendency to identify a man with his offence. But of course plagiarism is not sexual abuse, and the revelations about Fr. Tom’s guilt do not negate his signal contributions to the Church in Canada stretching back more than a generation.

As a brother priest, I might even hope that any scaling back of Fr. Tom’s media work might allow him more time for his own pastoral ministry, and the mentorship that he has offered to a great number of young people over the years at Salt & Light, before that as the chief organizer for World Youth Day 2002 in Toronto, and even before that at the Catholic chaplaincy at the University of Toronto.

Ever y priest, every preacher is a servant of the Word that was in the beginning with God, the Word that became flesh in Jesus Christ. Some of us exercise that service with more words of our own than others. All of them fall short of the Word Himself.

Fr. Tom, as a scholar and linguist, is a master of the word. The plagiarist takes the words of others to make them his own. Fr. Tom has no need to do that anymore; he never did. The preacher offers his own words that others might know the Word. Fr. Tom still has much to offer.

GOOD NEWS IS THAT NEITHER SIDE, WE CAN ASSUME, WANTS A WAR. — GURNEY