A Cloud Over the Synod

In recent days, there's been a lot of hubbub -- or, as Neuhaus would say, "there has occasioned a brouhaha" -- involving the form and content of the Instrumentum Laboris for the Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist which opens this Sunday. Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie last week excoriated the document in the pages of America magazine, calling its theological insight "poor."

Well, a revelation from Robert Mickens in Rome about the author of the document might just cause more shockwaves. This is Mickens' own reporting -- it has not been published anywhere else.

ROME – The international Synod of Bishops convenes in Rome on Sunday amidst sharp criticism of the meeting’s working document and disclosures that its author was dismissed from a leading pontifical university in the 1990s for plagiarism.

A former high-ranking official at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute (PIL) here in Rome confirmed that Fr Nicola Bux – an Italian professor in Bari and the main writer of the “instrumentum laboris” for the 2-23 October synod on the Eucharist – was “not invited back” to teach at the PIL soon after it was discovered that he had published substantial segments of other scholars’ work “verbatum and without direct attribution” in a 1996 book.

“This is hardly a revelation,” said one Rome-based professor, pointing out that the plagiarism charges were made public in 2000 in the PIL’s triennial journal, “Ecclesia Orans”. In a review of Fr Bux’s book – “La Liturgia degli Orientali” (The Liturgy of the Orientals) – Fr Robert Taft SJ said the Italian priest had copied “ad litteram (including, at times, mistakes)… without required permission” of at least three Jesuit authors, including Taft himself. Fr Taft, one of the world’s foremost Eastern Church scholars, wrote that he had “made known what had happened to the (copied) authors and academic authorities in question”.

A senior liturgy professor in Rome said the 1996 incident was widely known by the city’s academic community. He said that, as a result, Fr Bux was “un-esteemed” (disprezzato) among most liturgists here....

Heady, heady stuff.

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