Plagiarism is so wrong... the mark of an insecure and systematically dishonest writer

1. Fr. Rosica, Fraud

   by Joshua P. Hochschild 2 . 26 . 19
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Earlier this month, journalists discovered that Fr. Thomas Rosica—an influential and (it was believed) media-savvy Catholic priest—had plagiarized portions of some of his speeches and popular publications. After about a week of silence, he offered an apology, of sorts: “What I’ve done is wrong, and I am sorry about that.”

But the scale of the plagiarism suggested deeply ingrained habits—those of an insecure and systematically dishonest writer. And the “apology” seemed calculated to minimize the crime in three ways: Though he said he was sorry, he also insisted his plagiarism wasn’t malicious, he described it as unintentional (an unfortunate accident resulting from sloppy research habits), and he blamed it on others (some of his material is drafted by “interns”).

From a priest who should know better, this is worrying. In addition to boasting academic credentials (degrees and institutional affiliations), he has delivered and published lectures and addresses for prominent audiences, is CEO of a Canadian media company (Salt and Light Media), and has been a media attaché for various Vatican initiatives. This isn’t just any priest who has plagiarized: Rosica is a communications expert, a professional intellectual, an authority. More than most ministers of the Word, he traffics in words.

Given the extent of his theft, there was reason to expect that the plagiarizing had begun more than a decade ago, and might even be found in his scholarship. Sure enough, in the first essay I checked—published 25 years ago and related to one of his academic theses—Rosica had clearly and extensively plagiarized.

Others found more, pressure increased in the press and social media, and two days later—yesterday—he “apologized” again (only digging his hole deeper by claiming, incredibly, that his plagiarism was “never deliberate”). But his academic board memberships were already falling away; the story isn’t over, but one suspects that soon other organizations—perhaps including the Vatican Press Office, institutions that awarded him degrees, and even his media company—will be eager to cut ties.

Still, in the light—or rather, the darkness—of the Church’s larger clergy abuse scandal, a plagiarizing priest may hardly register. Rosica’s habit undermines his integrity, and the extent of his intellectual malpractice destroys his credibility in academic, professional, and ecclesiastical life. But given the faithful’s graver challenges, is a little cut-and-paste such a big deal for the Church?

Teachers often exhort: Don’t “steal” words and ideas, produce “original” work, and express it “in your own words.” This framing suggests why plagiarism is wrong, but it’s not adequate, even for students: What if the source of the borrowed text is offered for free, or contracted for sale? And how many assignments reward genuine originality as opposed to, say, accurate exegesis, clear analysis, or adequate understanding?

The real problem with plagiarism is not unoriginality but inauthenticity. Students need to do “their own work”—not by presenting novel ideas, but by presenting their own effort. The same applies to writing done outside the classroom. Anyone who claims to be an author is expressing words with a kind of authority and relying on a presumption of authenticity. When prosecuted as a crime, plagiarism is sometimes handled under intellectual property law. But plagiarism itself is not a traditional legal category, and someone can plagiarize even when there is no specific intellectual property claim.

The main victim of plagiarism isn’t the source’s original author, but the plagiarizing author’s audience. Plagiarism isn’t a violated property claim, but false representation: It is fraud. And like other forms of fraud, its gravity is both internal and external. It perverts the rational soul and damages the wider community.

This is why Dante treated fraud with such detail in Inferno. Malebolge, the eighth circle of Hell, is a mockery of civic life—an inverted city populated by those who have undermined the very basis of community: trust. Higher up, one finds the perversions of the passions, but the ditches of Malebolge are populated by those who represent an astonishing diversity of social corruption caused by the abuse of truth—grifters and swindlers, cheaters and con-men, charlatans and mountebanks, manipulators and profiteers, simonists and barrators, schismatics and scandal-mongers, perjurers and manipulators, forgers and counterfeiters.

Thieves are here too, in the seventh ditch, as a reminder that theft expresses not just selfish greed, but a lie and a violation of community. But at the bottom, in the tenth ditch, Dante locates the falsifiers—of metals, persons, coins, and, finally, of words. There at the bottom of Malebolge is where the plagiarists belong, with the other language-falsifiers, at the threshold to betrayal and treason.

Dante’s infernal geography can help map the habitually plagiarizing “communications expert” onto the wider crisis of trust in the church. In “the abuse crisis,” the violation stems not only from sexual crimes—lapses of lust and perversions of appetite—but from deliberate, habitual, and systematically deceptive behavior. The church crisis is about pedophiles, harassers, and abusers, but it is also about panderers and seducers, false counselors and flatterers, hypocrites and impostors. Personal corruption is shrouded in systemic violations of social trust, individual physical transgressions covered in a culture of intellectual and spiritual perversion.

Does Fr. Rosica deserve mercy? Of course. But we should still be outraged at his long habit of linguistic fraud. Empty apologies are a lame attempt to hide from the natural (and, one hopes, healing) shame of corruption exposed.

Joshua P. Hochschild is Monsignor Robert R. Kline Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University.

Farewell to ‘church shopping’

Andrew M Brown

21 February, 2019

Do you go “shopping” for a church where you find the style of worship suits you, or because you find the priest congenial and the congregation friendly (but not too friendly)? The practice is frowned upon in some Catholic circles, though it’s normal in the Anglican Church with its greater range of worship styles. Many Catholics hold that you should support your local parish church, and that the Mass is the same wherever you go anyway.

In practice there is much variation. The priest’s attitude to the Mass and its meaning, his view of what worshippers might like – these factors make a difference. Readers will have experienced liturgy that is lacklustre; egomaniac priests who drone on, turning their homilies into Marxist tracts, or act like game-show hosts and insert irritating ad-libs into the sacred wording. And then there’s the music …

For all these reasons I became a church-shopper. First I favoured St Mary’s, Cadogan Street, in central London, because the priest at that time, the biblical scholar Fr Robert Letellier, was a superb teacher, and even his brief weekday homilies would leave you with something to ponder or explore further.

Then I went to St Etheldreda’s in Ely Place, Holborn, where there was a Sunday Sung Mass. The choir was excellent (still is, I’m sure), and the Mass so popular that some regulars travelled in from outside London.

I got married at Ely Place, in a traditional-style but idiosyncratic ceremony. It contained parts of the Sarum Missal, with phrases that evoke the Book of Common Prayer. I’m sure I remember “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here …”

We started a family and moved to the London Oratory, in Knightsbridge, which was still a Tube or car ride away. But we have been faithful attenders there for about 14 years. We like the “low” Masses. Like everything at the Oratory, these simpler liturgies are carried out with total seriousness and feel grounded in reality. Even at the more elaborate ceremonies the participants are focused on the meaning of what they’re doing, not on the theatre of it. And because they are well practised, everything flows and you are not distracted by clumsiness.

The depressing thing is that Catholics in many parts of the country outside London do not have a choice. If they’re unlucky they might be saddled with a liturgy that bores them into a state of disillusionment.

But anecdotal evidence suggests that the situation has been improving since Benedict XVI’s renewed focus on beauty and the liturgy. He made it clear that aesthetics cannot be dismissed as something trivial or irrelevant. In his reflection on the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis, he points to an equivalence between beauty and love: “As St Bonaventure would say, in Jesus we contemplate beauty and splendour at their source. This is no mere aestheticism, but the concrete way in which the truth of God’s love in Christ encounters us, attracts us and delights us, enabling us to emerge from ourselves and drawing us towards our true vocation, which is love.” The liturgy should aim for the sublime, “a glimpse of heaven on earth”.

This doesn’t have to mean bells and smells and the splendour of a High Mass. The beauty of the liturgy can be in the care that’s taken. Which brings me to a current Mass spot, which is at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in Putney, a short stroll from my home. Florence Nightingale and Charles Dickens were involved with it in the 19th century. Today it treats patients with often catastrophic brain injuries caused by anything from a stroke to a motorcycle accident.

The priest of my parish church, St Thomas à Becket, Wandsworth, says Mass at the hospital. Parishioners help out, laying out chairs and Mass books, bringing patients down from the wards in their special wheelchairs. Thoughtful deployment of altar cloth, candles and a crucifix, combined with Fr Alex McAllister’s brilliantly pithy homilies, rooted in Scripture, mean that the liturgy in this setting fulfils Pope Benedict’s prescription: that beauty is not mere decoration, but “an essential element of the liturgical action”, since it comes from God. I felt humbled, on a recent Sunday near the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, to be anointed with the sacrament of the sick along with patients, their relations and a few locals.

I have come full circle. I still keep in touch with my friends at the Oratory but I am also getting to know my local parish and parish priest. Perhaps “church shopping” will once again become something only Anglicans do.

Andrew M Brown is obituaries editor of The Daily Telegraph

A Catholic gentleman: the inspiring life of Philip Trower

William Doino Jr

25 February, 2019

Philip Trower

Trower was an erudite and strongly orthodox Catholic writer with an extraordinary past

The word “gentleman” has largely fallen out of favor, which is a shame, because there isn’t a better word to describe Philip Trower, an elegant Catholic writer whose long life came to an end on January 9th. He was 95, and leaves behind a rich legacy.

I was good friends with Philip for many years, but what I learned during the last ten of them made me admire him even more.

I discovered Philip when he began writing incisive essays about the post-Conciliar crisis for The Wanderer, an American Catholic weekly. One series he penned, about the heresy of Modernism and its re-emergence in our time, was so well done it was later collected in a book, The Church Learned and the Revolt of the Scholars. This was followed by two more accomplished works, Turmoil and Truth: The Historical Roots of the Modern Crisis in the Catholic Church, and The Catholic Church and the Counter-Faith: A Study of the Roots of Modern Secularism, Relativism and de-Christianisation.

The titles might lead one to think that Trower was highly suspicious of modernity, but that would be a mistake. Philip was strongly orthodox, but also a renaissance man who welcomed the spirit of Catholic inquiry and development, provided it was rooted in Sacred Scripture and Tradition.

The brilliance of his books is that they offer a nuanced but convincing defense of Vatican II, while showing where both “progressives” and “traditionalists” go wrong (sometimes disastrously so) in interpreting it.

Though Philip was not a professional academic, he certainly had the knowledge of one. His work has been praised by Father Aidan Nichols, James Hitchcock and Tracey Rowlands, among other Catholic luminaries. In a recent interview, in fact, Dr Rowlands made it a point to complement Trower’s perspective on the warring divisions within the Church: “I agree with Philip Trower that these two groups have been engaged in a ‘theological star wars’ over the heads of the faithful. The fall-out from these stellar battles lands in parishes but Catholics who have not studied theology are unable to identify the origins of the bits of ‘space junk’ they encounter.”

That’s an apt description of the disorientation so many Catholics feel after decades of fractious debates.

As a young Catholic trying to make my way through the maelstrom of post-Vatican II conflicts, I recall reading dozens of books on the subject, until finally finding clarity and peace by reading Trower’s masterful trilogy, alongside St. John Paul II and (future pope) Joseph Ratzinger.

Trower could make devastating critiques of Karl Rahner and Hans Kung, yet be equally generous toward those engaged in more noble pursuits: “One has only to recall the immense good achieved by faithful Catholic scholars and theologians to feel grateful to God for their gifts.”

Impressed by his erudition – and especially his ability to convey complex topics in lucid terms – I wrote Trower a letter of appreciation. He replied, and our long-distance friendship, between America and Britain, was born.

We kept our correspondence going, invariably surveying the Catholic controversies of the day. They irritated me to no end, but Philip always handled them with aplomb, owing to his serene confidence in the Holy Spirit and knowledge of what the Church had already endured. He helped strengthen my faith by encouraging a strong prayer life, self-discipline and proper focus, lest Catholic dissenters throw me off stride. I called him whenever I was perplexed by a topic, and he was unfailingly patient and polite in answering all my questions. I soon learned I was but one of many of his informal “students.”

I became so engrossed in our lively exchanges that it never occurred to me to ask Philip about his earlier life (all I knew was that he was a convert); but when I did, the dramatic journey he recounted both stunned and inspired me.

Born into a prominent Anglican family, and educated at Eton and Oxford, Philip appeared destined for a legal career, until World War II intervened. Commissioned by the British army in 1942, he joined the Rifle Brigade, and took part in the Italian campaign, where he was wounded but survived to complete his military service as an intelligence officer in Egypt.

During the War, he told me, he had drifted away from his Christian faith, and his personal life subsequently “went off the rails.” Knowing how stable and mature he was, I could hardly believe this, but, as Philip gently reminded me, “the devil can bring down anyone.”

Toward the end of his service, Philip met the American émigré, Dunstan Thompson, a fallen-away Catholic who by then had become a prominent “gay” poet. The two became lovers and went off to live in a small British village. Dunstan continued writing poetry and Philip became a successful novelist and writer for the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. Their childhood faith in Christ appeared to be long gone.

But, as God often makes unexpected appearances, He did so in their lives as well. Philip and Dunstan were visiting Walsingham one weekend, not far from where they lived, when a procession of the Blessed Sacrament passed by. Dunstan suddenly fell to his knees and made the sign of the Cross – all before his shocked companion. Philip immediately sensed there was something much greater than his earthly relationship with Dunstan, and that it would have profound consequences for their lives. It did. After Dunstan told Philip that he had made a complete confession and reconciled with the Church, Philip knew that meant an immediate end to their sexual relationship. At first, Philip felt isolated and abandoned, but soon realized it was a great blessing, for it liberated him from a life of sin which he always knew to be wrong. Better yet, Dunstan’s Catholic reawakening led Philip to become a Catholic as well, discovering what he had providentially been told, by a friend, as a young man: “You will never find love until you find it in the tabernacle.” The two remained very close companions (Philip served as Dunstans’ literary executor after the poet’s death in 1975) but, faithful to Catholic teaching, never sinned with one another again.

For all the years I corresponded and spoke with Philip, there was one regret I had, as he approached 90: I never had the honor of meeting him in person. In 2012, however, an opportunity arose, as I was invited to England for a major Intelligence Squared debate over Pope Pius XII’s wartime record, at the Royal Institution in London. Might Philip be able to attend? He was in his late eighties by then, but said he would try to make it.

When the night arrived, Professor Ronald Rychlak and I, supporting Pius XII, took part in an intense debate against two relentless critics. When it was over, I felt then, and feel even stronger today, that our side is winning the “Pius War” and will ultimately prevail. But on that night, after the verbal fireworks had ended, I only wanted to know if Philip was amidst the large crowd. After 20 minutes passed, and most of the large audience had filed out, I saw no trace of him, and so concluded he had not been able to come, sadly. Then, just as I was ready to leave, I heard a gracious voice behind me, with a delightful British accent, “William, is that you?”

I turned around and there saw my great friend.

“Philip! Philip!” I exclaimed, like a typical overexcited American. “How wonderful it is to finally meet you!”

He was equally pleased (I trust), but more composed and responded by removing his cap and nodding his head. I thought he was being playful, but quickly realized he was serious, and responded accordingly. “To what do I owe this honor?”

“I just wanted to thank you for combating the campaign against one of the great Popes of my lifetime.”

In 1945, while he was still in the military, and almost a decade before his conversion, Philip had gotten a rare opportunity to meet Pius XII in private, and said of the papal encounter: “I have come across few men in my life whom I have so instantly warmed to and liked.”

I thanked him for his kind words, but said I was but one cog of a much broader movement determined to clear the good name of Pius XII with unassailable evidence.

There wasn’t much time left before the Royal Institution asked those remaining to clear out, but as this was my first – and, as it turned out, only – time I would ever meet Philip, I wanted those fifteen minutes with him to last, and they have. I can still recall our fruitful conversation – about the ineffable beauty of the Catholic faith – and remember him as a classic English gentleman, impeccably dressed, with flawless manners, a sympathetic demeanor, and above all, a clearly expressed, deeply held faith. There was a sparkle in his eyes and a broad smile on his face when we spoke. He must have known, along with his hero, John Henry Newman, that being a Catholic is a precious gift, and that those of us blessed to have it should rejoice in devoting ourselves to the Kingdom of God.

Now Philip has died, after an extraordinary life, and has surely been granted his Heavenly reward. May he rest in peace and everlasting glory with Christ Our Lord, whom he so loved.

Rosica apologizes for plagiarism

JD Flynn/CNA

23 February, 2019

Fr Rosica (Chris Adamczyk/Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation)

'What I’ve done is wrong, and I am sorry about that,' the Vatican spokesman said

A long-time Vatican spokesman has admitted to passing off the writing of others as his own, and apologized for plagiarizing.

“What I’ve done is wrong, and I am sorry about that. I don’t know how else to say it,” Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB, told the National Post on February 22.

Rosica, a long-serving English language press aide at the Vatican Press Office, and the CEO of Canada’s Salt+Light Television network, was reported by Life Site News on February 15 to have plagiarized sections of text in several lectures and op-eds from a variety of writers, among them priests, theologians, journalists, and at least two cardinals.

Subsequent reports found widespread plagiarism in essays, speeches, and op-eds by Rosica, dating back more than a decade. Plagiarized sections in some texts ran beyond even one paragraph.

Rosica told the National Post that he had passed off the work of others as his his own because his notes were disorganized, and because he relied on material prepared by interns.

“I realize I relied too much on compiled notes,” Rosica told the National Post, adding that his plagiarism was inadvertent and not malicious. He explained that “it could have been cut and paste,” apparently meaning that he had mistakenly included passages of text written by others in his texts without remembering to attribute them.

“I realize the seriousness of this and I regret this very much … I will be very vigilant in future,” he said.

Rosica is a member of the governing board at the Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College, to whom he told the National Post he planned to apologize. I will apologize that this came to light, and it’s wrong, and it’s not going to happen again,” Rosica said.

The college’s board chairman said in statement that the university takes the matter very seriously, and intends “to address the matter internally going forward.”

Rosica, a member of the Congregation of St. Basil, oversaw Toronto’s 2002 World Youth Day, and is currently assisting with the Vatican’s global summit on child sexual abuse.

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TEMPORARY CLOSURE DUE TO TECHNICAL UPGRADING

Gene's blog will be closed down temporarily in the early hours of 24th February due to the technicians working on upgrading the site. My sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused during this outage.

GENE

An exposé of high-ranking gays in the Catholic Church bears the fingerprints of the Pope’s closest advisors

Team Francis are playing a nasty game in encouraging this attack on their conservative enemies

Damian Thompson

In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy Frédéric Martel, translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside

Bloomsbury, pp.£25, 576

The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s ‘global summit’ of bishops to discuss the sexual abuse of minors. The book appeared in eight languages on Thursday morning, just as the gathering began. It is being hyped as a ‘bombshell’ that will ‘blow apart’ the summit.

We shall see. Certainly many Catholic priests are more interested in Martel’s exposé than in Francis’s initiative. The author spent four years researching the subject of high-ranking gays in the Catholic church. Forty-one cardinals spoke to him. That seems brave, given that Martel is an LGBT campaigner and some of those cardinals are thunderous opponents of the gay lobby. They must have been worried that they’d be stitched up if they refused. Also, some of them presumably wanted to find out what dirt he had on them.

Meanwhile, In the Closet of the Vatican bears the fingerprints of Francis’s closest advisors, presumably acting without his knowledge. I don’t know why they allowed Martel to publish his book now, when it can only embarrass the Pope. I do know that they are playing a nasty game.

More of that in a minute. You must be wondering, like all those priests who’ve pre-ordered the book on Amazon, precisely what Martel reveals. That’s difficult to answer, because he’s not into providing proof. He prefers insinuation — not just a soupçon but great dollops of it, with a side dish of cod psychology.

So Benedict XVI is a repressed homosexual, he theorises, because his ‘emotional tendencies’ point in that direction and he likes operas featuring ‘androgynous figures’. Martel also has suspicions about Cardinal Raymond Burke, Cardinal Gerhard Müller and just about any prelate who has challenged Francis.

We’re given a taste of his methodological rigour when he visits Müller, the German theologian whom Francis sacked as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for voicing concerns at the pontiff’s DIY theology. The conversation is interrupted by a phone call. Müller takes it ‘without apologising’, and starts speaking,

assuming an affected pose: now he has manners. He starts talking in German, in a perfumed voice… If I didn’t have a man in front of me — a man who had taken a vow of chastity — and if I didn’t hear echoing down the line a baritone voice, I would have understood it to be an intimate call.

There are many passages like this. They suggest that Martel is, to put it charitably, an odd fish. He is besotted with Rimbaud, sleeping beside a volume of his poetry, and the generation of tortured French gay artists and intellectuals who followed him. He presses a ‘white volume’ (he won’t say what it is) into the hands of his inter-viewees. On almost every page he outs himself as a raging bore.

He’s more than an odd fish, though. He’s a menace, because he hasn’t bothered to equip himself with basic theological knowledge. He assures us that Cardinal Burke regards homosexuality as ‘a grave sin’. No, he doesn’t, because the church teaches that it is homosexual acts that are sinful, not the disposition. Martel then spends pages ridiculing Burke’s (admittedly lavish) clerical attire. He won’t let go of the idea that traditionalist clergy dress like women. He even consults a drag queen, who diagnoses a ‘fluid and queer’ gender identity.

I know why the Pope’s hardline allies, known as Team Francis, indulged Martel.They wanted a hit job on their conservative enemies; he was writing this book and they saw their chance. But, since the would-be assassin knew so little about the church — he seems to think that only bishops are addressed as ‘monsignor’ — they had to guide his hand, not just towards Burke et al but away from the Pope. Thus Martel goes to Argentina to write about Francis’s background, but not all of it: the allegation that he covered up child abuse there ‘lies outside the scope of this book’. Likewise, conveniently, the alleged wrongdoings of the Pope’s close ally Cardinal Maradiaga.

Unfortunately for Team Francis, they have landed themselves in The Pink Panther rather than The Day of the Jackal. Edward Fox’s assassin may have narrowly failed in his mission, but at least he didn’t hit the wrong target. Martel’s Inspector Clouseau accidentally wounds the Supreme Pontiff — by revealing that, according to the Pope’s own entourage, Francis knew about the sins of ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick years ago and chose to do nothing.

That is really the only story in this book. It’s true that Martel confirms that the Vatican is full of gossipy queens, most of whom stare at waiters’ bottoms and some of whom have sex with young men. But I think we knew that already.