Fr. Michael Bechard of the Diocese of London, Ontario, told The Pillar this week that he hopes his story might encourage other priests harmed in the Church to find healing.
The Pillar reported last month that a Canadian priest had filed a lawsuit alleging that he was sexually assaulted by the formerly influential media figure Fr. Thomas Rosica during the run-up to World Youth Day 2002, which was held in Toronto.
The Pillar subsequently reported that the same priest had lodged a canonical complaint against Bishop Ronald Fabbro of the Diocese of London, Ontario, alleging that the bishop had failed to act when informed about his allegations against Rosica.
The lawsuit was filed under a pseudonym, and the priest was not identified in The Pillar’s reporting.
But after subsequent media coverage by other outlets published identifying characteristics of the priest, including his initials and details of his previous ministerial assignments, Bechard contacted The Pillar offering an interview on his allegations against Rosica, and his Vos estis complaint against his own bishop — Rosica’s former religious superior in the Congregation of St. Basil.
Bechard told The Pillar that he had first met Rosica as a recently ordained priest, and was immediately impressed by his charisma and abilities as a public speaker. He said that he came to work closely with Rosica, looking up to him as a mentor, before experiencing instances of alleged sexual assault — along with what he says were promises of “career advancement.”
The priest said that he distanced himself from Rosica and struggled with alcoholism as a result of his experiences, before eventually attempting to alert his bishop to Rosica’s alleged behavior.
Bechard told The Pillar this week that he filed a lawsuit because he believes accountability in the Church matters.
“I'm not looking to burn anything down. I'm just looking for a sense of accountability within the institution,” he said.
The priest said he first met Rosica in 1997: “He had come to our diocese to do a workshop for our clergy. And I remember after Tom spoke that I wanted to go up and thank him for his presentation because I thought he did a really great job.”
“He's a great speaker. I think he's able to weave together scripture and tradition like few people that I know. He's exceptionally talented and a real charismatic figure, and there was something there that I really wanted to emulate,” Bechard said. “So we got to know each other fairly well. I was regularly visiting him at the Newman Center in Toronto where he was executive director and chaplain to the University of Toronto community.”
“I was regularly staying at the Newman Center. During that time, Tom had invited myself and a couple of other young guys to travel with him to Ireland for a week and a half. So we spent that time together as well.”
After this initial period, Bechard said he was sent for graduate studies in the United States, and that after he returned to his diocese he was assigned to campus ministry, a role in which he was encouraged to pattern himself after Roscia.
“Tom was really raised up as someone that was doing great things and whose kind of position and way of conducting himself would be beneficial in our own context. So I was being encouraged by a lot of people to turn to Tom. He was kind of a mentor and a guide,” Bechard told The Pillar. “Tom eventually got me working with him on the preparations for World Youth Day, and that's really when a lot of the problems began.”
During the World Youth Day preparations, Bechard said he got to work closely with Rosica, and meet senior figures, including the prime minister. But it was in this context, he said, that he was subjected to sexual harassment and assault.
On one occasion, Bechard said, he received a phone call from Rosica inviting him on a trip.
“I received a phone call from Tom saying that he was looking to get away for a few days and was inviting me and some other folks to join in at a resort north of Toronto,” the priest said. “But when I got to the Newman Center in Toronto where Tom was living, or maybe on the way up to the resort, Tom had said that it was just going to be the two of us. I went into the bathroom after we arrived, and when I came out, Tom was reclined on the bed wearing a pair of white briefs and a T-shirt asking me to come and cuddle with him.”
“This was the first occasion,” said Bechard. “And I said, ‘Tom, no, what are you thinking?’ But he was rather persistent. I held my ground and then eventually just said to him, look, I'm not feeling well. I really want to go back to Toronto. So we got back in the car, drove back to the city, and I got in my car and drove back to the diocese.”
Bechard detailed a second incident, an alleged assault which he says took place in the context of preparations for a meeting with Canada’s prime minister.
“Tom was looking for the prime minister, Jean Chrétien, and his wife to become kind of the honorary patrons of World Youth Day, so he arranged for us to go to Ottawa to see them,” Bechard said. “And the night before we were to go to Ottawa, he asked me to come up to the Newman Center [in Toronto].”
“When I was at the Newman Center, I always stayed in a guest room — it was like this big Victorian house, with a big turret, and there was a room on the top that I normally stayed in. But Tom had indicated at that point that the house was full and they had lots of people coming and going, and that he needed to set up a cot in his room for me to stay in.”
“I found myself in Tom's room to sleep that night, and it was during that night when Tom started both grabbing at my buttocks and at my genitals,” Bechard alleged. “I just felt really kind of frozen in the moment and I didn't really know what to do. After saying no a number of times and kind of pushing myself away, and that was kind of the end of that physical assault.”
“Then, the next morning, he talked to me about wanting me to come and work full-time in the World Youth Day office. And I'm like, ‘Tom, I just got assigned to campus ministry. I've just begun teaching in the diocese. I have no desire to come and work full-time in Toronto, besides which that's my diocese and I've just come back from graduate studies and I really want to serve there.’ Then he said ‘I can really make your career go places,’” according to Bechard.
“And I said, ‘But it's not a career.’ I think the coupling of the physical assault and this ‘I can really make your career go places’ was kind of the defining moment where I said, ‘I don't want to work with this guy anymore or ever again’,” Bechard told The Pillar.
Rosica has denied any “improper conduct” with the priest, and urged a Canadian judge to dismiss Bechard’s lawsuit, so that allegations can be addressed in a canonical court.
Rosica’s faculties for priestly ministry were withdrawn in March, after Bechard filed suit against him.
In a response filed in an Ontario court, 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.”
Bechard told The Pillar that he found Roscia’s suggestion that they barely knew each other difficult to process.
“When I see Rosica’s claims of defense that he doesn't even know me, I'm like, ‘Well, Tom, we've traveled overseas together, we've sat together in the prime minister of the country's home and talked about World Youth Day. I've been at the table at the [university] center a number of times.’ I don't know how he can say with any sense of honesty and integrity that we don't know each other.”
“Not only did we know each other and work together, but I was a guy who he asked to cuddle, and then he would aggressively grab and grope.”
Bechard told The Pillar that after he stopped working with Rosica and returned to his diocese, he struggled for years to process what he says happened to him.
“There were a lot of conflicting kinds of emotions that came with the events, and I think part of it was this crazy power differential between myself and Father Rosica, because he was someone who I really did admire. He was someone that my superiors in the diocese asked me to follow,” he said.
“He is one of these guys that has a picture of him with every important official that you can imagine sitting in his office,” Bechard recalled, and listed several prominent churchmen Rosica had introduced him to. “So seeing some of these big figures and knowing that Tom knew these guys well, and they seem to have a friendly relationship, I never really felt that if I ever was to bring these stories forward that anybody would believe me.”
Bechard told The Pillar he struggled in ministry for several years after the 2002 World Youth Day: “I began to question my own identity and I began to ask myself if I did something inappropriate or if I did something to lead him on, or even to kind suggest that this behavior was warranted or appreciated or invited. And I held onto that and didn't really feel I had any venue to express those concerns really to anybody.”
“Lots of guilt, lots of shame, and a sense of remorse,” Bechard said. “I just began to drink and I was anxious, I was depressed, and that began to spiral. I began to abuse benzodiazepines. I began drinking to excess on a daily basis.”
Bechard said he eventually joined Alcoholics Anonymous and made efforts to process his internal struggles. “It was finally in January of 2008 that I got sober, began to put my own house in order. And then I began to have the courage to see myself authentically as God sees me, but also to realize that I didn't do anything to bring about this behavior.”
Despite beginning to process and work through the guilt, shame, and remorse he says he felt over what had happened, Bechard told The Pillar that he still did not feel able to come forward about his experiences.
“It was confusing for me because I was brought up in a deeply religious home. We always had clergy and religious in and out of my family's home. They were people that I held in high esteem, and I think it was kind of soul crushing. It wasn't just the physical assault, it was the spiritual assault, and then the disenfranchisement and the disengagement and the lack of trust that came about within the institutional Church,” he said.
That sense, he said, grew as he watched Roscia rise to greater international prominence.
“I was awfully concerned that if I was to reveal this to other people, that they would have no respect for me either. I mean, Tom is somebody that was so well known on a global stage after World Youth Day, he founded Salt+Light Television, he was lecturing all over the country. He began doing more and more work for the Holy See, and he's doing translations and communications work, giving speeches for people.”
After serving as the principal organizer of the 2002 World Youth Day, Rosica became a Vatican advisor and media attaché, and was a fixture in Catholic media and television for nearly two decades, before his prominence was stalled by 2019 reports of widespread plagiarism.
It was only when Rosica appeared in conversation in the Diocese of London, Bechard alleged, that he first spoke to his own ordinary, Bishop Ronaldo Fabbro, about what had happened.
But Bechard claims his attempt was brushed off.
“We were talking about various liturgical matters in 2015 or 2016, because I was director of liturgy for the diocese, and I was teaching liturgy at seminary and at our diocesan college, and we were looking at different speakers that could come in and do some formation work with us,” he recalled.
“The bishop, who's a Basilian [Fr. Rosica’s religious order], and was the superior at the time when Tom abused me, he had brought up Tom's name. I said to him, ‘Bishop, Tom Rosica’s behavior with me and with other young men has been really inappropriate — I can't recommend him to the diocese.’ And that's when the bishop said, ‘Well, I'm unaware of that.’ And he just got up and concluded the conversation.”
“I kind of left his office feeling rather frustrated and kind of hurt,” Bechard told The Pillar. “I don't want to say ‘revictimized’ because I don't really see myself as a victim, but I was disappointed that my bishop didn't seem to take my concerns seriously.
After that, Bechard said, he didn’t try to raise the issue again.”
“I thought,” said Bechard, “who's going to believe this young kid from the country that's now got a drinking problem when you've got this man that's well known on the global stage by not one, not two, but three different popes?”
The Diocese of London told The Pillar that Bishop Fabbro denies Bechard’s account of events.
“A recent report in the online publication ‘The Pillar’ and other media outlets contains serious allegations that Bishop Ronald Fabbro failed to act in 2015 when a priest from the Diocese reported misconduct by Fr. Thomas Rosica in the early 2000s, directed towards the priest,” the diocese said in a statement sent to The Pillar.
“Bishop Fabbro denies this allegation,” the diocese said. “A diocesan priest did inform Bishop Fabbro of alleged misconduct by Fr. Rosica that had taken place years earlier. The Bishop advised the diocesan priest that the correct course of action was to contact the Congregation of St. Basil so they could begin an investigation.”
Bechard told The Pillar that the effects of the alleged assault bled into his ministry, too.
“I was struggling with the sense of unworthiness and just being filthy and having nowhere to go with that — standing up as a presider on a daily basis or even for Sundays became very, very challenging.”
“I've always understood Jesus to be someone who identified with those on the margins. So I think, in some respects, there was a sense that even in the difficulty and in the darkness, that God was still present,” he said.
“But I think while I knew this on an academic level, I would be lying to the fact that I felt that in my heart as well, because I didn't. I think in terms of my prayer life and kind of relationship with the diocesan Church, I am really uncomfortable now being around other clergy. I hate being at clergy gatherings because I have this sense that someone's going to hurt me or try to take advantage of me.”
Bechard also told The Pillar that he believed his situation and experiences were “strange” and outside of what most people understood to be clerical abuse.
“I recognize that it's a very odd situation, adult on adult, and it's priest on priest, which is not something that is discussed all that often. It's scandalous behavior.”
Even so, two of the most high profile cases of clerical abusers in recent decades have involved cardinals who were accused of sexually harassing or assaulting adults, including priests.
In 2013, Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned from office over instances of inappropriate sexual behavior involving three diocesan priests and one former priest. In 2018, then-cardinal Theodore McCarrick faced numerous accusations involving adult males, including seminarians, in addition to allegations involving minors.
Ironically for Bechard, following the McCarrick scandal, Rosica acted as a high-profile participant and official spokesman during the Vatican’s 2019 global abuse summit, convened by Pope Francis, in which he urged that the problem of clerical sexual abuse not be “ignored.”
“I think it went about as well as you can imagine,” Bechard said. “I found myself physically sick watching the whole thing unfold, nauseous, and I think perplexed or confused by the level of hypocrisy in the whole thing. And I just had to keep going back to the scriptures where we do as they say, but we do not do as they do.”
Shortly thereafter, Rosica’s prominence in the global Church was stalled by reports of widespread plagiarism in his published work and speeches, something Bechard said helped bring him a measure of peace.
“Once I got sober and worked through a lot of that personal pain and sense of shame and guilt, I finally felt a certain degree of vindication when Tom was finally accused of repeated plagiarism over decades.”
“At that point, he was removed from a number of academic positions, a number of other positions, a lot of committees, and I thought that was the final word,” said Bechard. “That was the end, I thought, of the Fr. Rosica story, so to speak. And I felt a real sense of peace with that.”
Between his brief conversation with Bishop Fabbro in 2015 and his decision to file a lawsuit in March of this year, Bechard told The Pillar that he had seen his ministry in the diocese change.
In 2023, he was asked to resign from his parish assignments by Bishop Fabbro without, Bechard says, any official explanation or reason given.
Bechard said the parish, a cluster of two churches, had had difficulties and tensions before his arrival several years previously, which had been exacerbated by the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. But he speculated that his own approach to ministry might have upset some parishioners.
“I think when I arrived, I kind of shook up some of the old guard a little bit,” he said. “I established a community kitchen. People could come and access food 24-7 through these outside fridges and freezers, and we started community meals and some refugee outreach — I think that my desire to create a community that was really focused on social justice and the alleviation of poverty and preaching the Good News to the poor was something that jarred people.”
The diocese did not comment on Bechard’s former assignment.
But whatever the reason, Bechard told The Pillar that when his bishop asked him to resign in July last year, he declined to offer him another assignment.
“He said I was under no canonical penalty and I had not violated any moral law. So I was, and I remain a priest in good standing in our diocese.”
But “basically he said to me, go off and find a job… So, he said, what do you want to do?”
“I said, well, I really want to work with other people living with addictions or mental health concerns or the homeless in our city. So I did some volunteer work with the Sisters of St. Joseph and a center that they run for the homeless. And then after that, I accepted a position at a place called Arcade Street Mission, and we do primary care, primary support, primary services for the homeless and living in poverty. So I haven't spoken to my bishop now since last July.”
Between then and now, Bechard made two decisions which have made him the until now unnamed center of international news: filing a lawsuit against Fr. Rosica, and filing a complaint under the norms of Vos estis lux mundi against Bishop Fabbro.
The impetus for both of these actions, Bechard said, was Roscia’s re-emergence into public life in the Church in Canada.
“I think it's when he came back and started kind of putting himself out there again as though none of this ever happened that I felt I needed to do something,” he said, pointing to public speaking events booked by Rosica and religious retreats he was slated to lead.
According to Bechard, he contacted the superior general of the Basilians in November of last year, explaining to Fr. Kevin Storey CSB his experiences with Rosica and meeting in person with him on December 27 in Toronto, but was surprised to see Rosica still listed to lead several events in the New Year.
The Pillar contacted the Basilian Fathers, requesting confirmation and comment on the meeting and the allegations in Fr. Bechard’s lawsuit.
In response, Fr. Storey told The Pillar that “Unfortunately, since your questions deal with an active lawsuit it would be inappropriate for me to respond.”
Bechard filed his suit in March of this year, making allegations of his own experiences of sexual harassment and assault by Rosica, but also charging that his religious order knew Rosica had been accused of acting inappropriately with other young men.
Bechard is arguing in court that in some of Rosica’s assignments, the priest had been the subject of complaints “about his actions with young males,” and that the order “took no steps to stop the behavior or to protect the Plaintiff, and instead, took steps to attempt to cover-up the behavior.”
He told The Pillar that his aim with the suit is to see Rosica taken out of public ministry.
“In terms of Father Rosica, I just hope that his ministry will be curtailed. I mean, I don't think that he should be in a position where he's teaching and preaching and kind of holding himself up as a model for priestly leadership while I believe he's a sexual predator.”
Following the lawsuit being filed in March, the Basilian order removed Rosica’s faculties for priestly ministry, according to documents reviewed by The Pillar.
Despite that, Rosica was still then listed as the facilitator of a “Walking with Francis” retreat at a Jesuit-owned retreat in July, and was advertised to lead another such retreat in January, at which he was set to “lead us each day with conferences, group reflections, Eucharistic Celebrations, and opportunities for individual Spiritual Direction.”
The priest was also scheduled to offer an Advent retreat at the same retreat center in November.
Following The Pillar’s initial report on Bechard’s lawsuit, the Canadian province of the Society of Jesus released a statement saying the society “remain[s] steadfast in our commitment to the safety and protection of minors and vulnerable adults” and that “rigorous safety protocols are applied uniformly to all individuals, including visiting clergy and collaborators.”
“In response to the recent civil lawsuit involving Father Thomas Rosica, CSB, and in accordance with our established procedures, he can no longer be associated with any ministry connected to our Jesuit apostolates until these legal and ecclesial matters are resolved,” the Jesuits said.
Prior to filing the civil suit, the priest said, he had already made a report against his own bishop via the independent reporting line set up by the Canadian bishops’ conference, arguing that his bishop was “negligent” in response to Bechard telling him in 2015 that Rosica had engaged in “inappropriate” behavior.
Bechard told The Pillar that his complaint, which he filed in February, had been acknowledged swiftly by chancery officials in the Archdiocese of Toronto, the metropolitan archdiocese, but he’d received no updates.
The priest acknowledged to The Pillar that he’d made no further attempts to raise his experiences with Rosica to his bishop after the brief conversation in 2015, and that his relationship with Bishop Fabbro had since become strained.
“Some people have said to me ‘You're bringing all this forward because you're mad at a bishop.’ I'm like, I am mad at my bishop, but not because I was removed from the parish. I'm mad at the bishop because he never took my allegations against Father Rosica seriously.”
“My hope would be that if a cleric comes forward expressing the concern or sharing that something inappropriate happened between himself and another cleric, that the bishop wouldn't end the conversation with ‘I don't know anything about that’, but say ‘what happened and how can I help?’” said Bechard.
“I'm hoping at the end of all this things will be better. But I don't anticipate they will be a lot better for me, I think, now that I've kind of brought things forward publicly,” Bechard said.
But, the priest added, “there’s a certain sense of freedom I've experienced in the last few months, knowing that I've now told my story and that people are taking it seriously. I do hope it maybe creates a space where other people can speak honestly and openly about the hurt that they've experienced.”
“I'm not looking to shame the Church. I'm looking to hold people accountable,” Bechard said.