Dougherty also raised fresh concerns about two other works by Rosica.
The professor said he found evidence of plagiarism in another recent article by Rosica about St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as Edith Stein. The piece was published on Il Sismografo on Aug. 8.
Rosica is also the author of record for “The Seven Last Words of Christ,” a book published in 2017 by Novalis, and shown by Dougherty and fellow philosophy professor Joshua Hochschild to include extensive portions of texts of other authors without attribution or quotation marks. Hochschild teaches at Mount St. Mary's in Emmitsburg, Maryland.
Some of the unattributed texts, the professors show, are taken verbatim or near-verbatim from writings and speeches by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, St. John Paul II, and Pope Francis.
The Italian translation of the book, published under the title “Le Sette Parole di Cristo sulla Croce,” is listed on the website of the Vatican’s publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana (LEV). The page links to other websites where the book can be purchased.
The editorial director of LEV, Lorenzo Fazzini, was informed of the book’s plagiarism at the end of March. Fazzini was also contacted by CNA for comment Oct. 12 and did not respond by publication time.
Dougherty and Hochschild are the authors of an article in the journal Horizons, published by Cambridge University Press, documenting what they call Rosica’s “serial plagiarism” and the ways it harms the practice of theology.
Dougherty told CNA he was surprised to see a new article by Rosica.
“At first, I thought the article was one of Father Rosica’s older pieces, since so many of his compilations are still on the internet. This article, however, bears a 2022 logo indicating a celebration of the 2022 bicentennial of the Basilian Fathers; it is newly published,” he said via email.
“A close inspection,” Dougherty said, “reveals that some of the copied sentences come from a recent 2021 article by Cardinal Michael Czerny. The article also manages to incorporate texts from a host of Catholic authors who remain uncredited, including America Magazine assistant editor Joseph McAuley, Jesuit and historian Norman Tanner, [and] NCR editor Tom Roberts, among others.”
The priest’s article also took passages from writing by a fellow member of the Basilian Fathers, Warren Schmidt.
(Story continues below)
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Past mistakes acknowledged
Rosica apologized in 2019 for his acts of plagiarism.
“I realize that I was not prudent nor vigilant with several of the texts that have surfaced and I will be very vigilant with future texts and compositions,” Rosica told The Catholic Register in February 2019.
“I take full responsibility for my lack of oversight and do not place the blame on anyone else but myself.”
He told the National Post the same month the errors were inadvertent mistakes, but not the intentional stealing of other’s words.
Rosica was reported in 2019 to have plagiarized sections of text in lectures and op-eds from a variety of writers, among them priests, theologians, journalists, and at least two cardinals.