LONDON (CANADA)
The Pillar [Washington DC]
August 9, 2025
By Michelle La Rosa
“In my view, the Plaintiff’s claim is not essentially doctrinal or ecclesiastical in nature,” the judge wrote.
A lawsuit accusing prominent media figure Fr. Thomas Rosica of sexual assault will move forward after a Canadian judge rejected the priest’s petition to dismiss the suit.
Judge Evelyn M. ten Cate of the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario on Thursday dismissed a motion by Rosica to toss out the lawsuit in order to allow the allegations against him to be addressed exclusively in a canonical court.
“In my view, the Plaintiff’s claim is not essentially doctrinal or ecclesiastical in nature – it is of interest to all Canadians and goes well beyond the internal matters of the Roman Catholic Church,” she said in her Aug. 7 decision.
“Moreover, the canonical court does not have an adequate internal dispute mechanism meant to cover claims for damages arising from sexual assault cases,” she continued.
“Specifically, it has no ability to award punitive or aggravated damages, cannot make a finding of vicarious liability, and has no enforcement mechanism.”
Rosica has denied the allegations against him. His attorney had argued that “the Court has no jurisdiction over the subject matter of this dispute as the Plaintiff and Fr. Rosica are ordained priests and the alleged assaults occurred while they were engaged in duties on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church. Any such complaints or allegations would be governed by Canon Law. The court should defer to the ecclesiastical court and its application of Canon Law.”
Rosica was a Vatican advisor and a fixture in Catholic media and television for nearly two decades, before his prominence was stalled by 2019 reports of widespread plagiarism.
The priest was also a high-profile participant in the Vatican’s 2019 global abuse summit, convened by Pope Francis, where he urged that the problem of clerical sexual abuse not be “ignored.”
The lawsuit against him, filed in Ontario in March 2024, alleges that Rosica developed a mentoring relationship with a newly ordained Canadian priest in the late 1990s, and also invited the young priest to assist in preparations for the 2002 World Youth Day, for which Rosica had been appointed chief executive officer.
The lawsuit was filed under a pseudonym, as is permitted in such suits by Canadian law, but the plaintiff later confirmed his identity as Fr. Michael Bechard of the Diocese of London, Ontario.
Bechard says Rosica developed a “close personal relationship” of “authority and trust” with him, creating opportunities to be alone with him.
The suit alleges that Rosica “made unwanted physical contact” with Bechard. It says Rosica exposed himself to the young priest, and repeatedly “groped and fondled” the young priest’s genitalia.
“Rosica facilitated the abuse under the guise of his role as teacher, priest, and guidance counselor, and further with a view of implicitly or explicitly helping the Plaintiff’s career within the Church in return for Rosica’s sexual advances,” the suit charges.
The older priest “used his position of authority and trust, as well as the dependency relationship that he had fostered with the Plaintiff, to ensure that the Plaintiff did not tell anyone about the behaviors they had engaged in,” the lawsuit adds.
The lawsuit also charges that Rosica’s religious order, the Congregation of St. Basil, failed to properly supervise Rosica, and ignored complaints about his inappropriate interactions with young men.
In March 2024, the order removed Rosica’s faculties for priestly ministry, according to documents reviewed by The Pillar.
Despite that, Rosica continued to be listed as the facilitator of a several different events at a Jesuit-owned retreat later in 2024 and into 2025.
In a response to the lawsuit, Rosica denied “that he had a close personal relationship with the Plaintiff in any capacity, and denies he had any control or influence over him, or that he preyed upon him or sexually abused him.”
Instead, Rosica’s response claimed that he had “infrequent ministerial contact with the Plaintiff between 1996 and 2002, but denies sexually abusing or sexually assaulting or making unwanted physical contact or engaging in any improper conduct with the Plaintiff.”
Rosica was ordained a priest in 1986, and rose to prominence when he was the principal organizer of Toronto’s World Youth Day in 2002.
In 2003, Rosica helped launch Salt+Light Television, a Toronto-based Catholic television network. The priest was appointed in 2009 a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Social Communication, and in 2013 a Vatican spokesman ahead of the conclave which elected Pope Francis, and was a media advisor during 2008 and 2018 Synods of Bishops at the Vatican.
Rosica was also a participant in the Vatican’s February 2019 global summit on clerical sexual abuse, which was convened by Pope Francis in the wake of the 2018 Theodore McCarrick scandal.
“We’ve watched one country after another face [clerical abuse scandals],” Rosica told reporters at the start of that summit. “And more countries to come. This is now at the highest level of the Church. This is at the universal level. Nobody can ignore this right now.”
In 2019, Rosica resigned his leadership position at Salt+Light, and several university board positions, amid widespread indications that he had serially committed plagiarism in his published works.
Rosica said that he had been neither “prudent nor vigilant with several of the texts that have surfaced,” and said that the apparent plagiarism had been a “lack of oversight.”
“If there was an error on my part, it is that I have often relied on others who have generously helped me in my preparation of various texts and I did not do the necessary checking into sources, etc. I regret that. It was never willfully done,” Rosica said in a February 2019 statement.