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Fr. Thomas Rosica.Salt and Light / Youtube

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May 31, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – A priest accused of decades of plagiarism will no longer be attending the annual conference of a left-wing American priests’ association.

Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB, CEO of Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation, was originally scheduled to direct a retreat at the 2019 Association of United States Catholic Priests (AUSCP) Assembly in St. Louis, Missouri this June.

In March Fr. Bob Bonnot, the executive director of AUSCAP, defended the choice of the disgraced priest as the association’s retreat director. Now a revised version of the schedule indicates that he is no longer on the roster.

Paul Leingang, a spokesman for the AUSCAP, told LifeSiteNews via email that Salt and Light’s Sebastian Gomes will lead the retreat in Rosica’s stead.  

“Although Fr. Thomas Rosica is unable to attend the assembly, Gomes will lead the retreat on the theme as planned: Go, Repair and Build My Church: Reclaiming the Priesthood of the Faithful,” he wrote.

Describing Gomes as “a young layperson who has a background in theology and history,” Leingang added that the new retreat director is the producer of a new documentary film named The Francis Impact.  

“That film will be shown as planned at the June 24 retreat,” Leingang wrote.  

“It will be followed by a guided group reflection on its themes and how they relate to the assembly theme: God’s Priestly People: the Baptized and the Ordained.

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Professor Joshua Hochschild of Mount St. Mary’s University observed that Leingang consulted Rosica himself about the above statement publicly over Twitter.  

Following revelations earlier this year that he had plagiarized from dozens of other authors in many of his published writings and speeches over a period of thirty years, Rosica began a sabbatical for “rest and renewal.”

Professor Hochschild announced on March 28 that he had discovered the uncredited work of Fr. John O'Malley, Kenneth Himes, Pope Benedict XVI, St. John Paul II, and Cardinal Tagle in the keynote address Fr. Rosica gave at the 2015 AUSCP Assembly in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Rosica plagiarism scandal broke when LifeSiteNews discovered in mid-February that the Toronto-based priest, once a spokesman for the Vatican, had plagiarized passages of a speech he gave at the Von Hügel Institute at Cambridge University. Subsequently, more examples of Rosica’s plagiarism came to light and the story spread, first to Canada’s National Post and then around the world.