Founder, Catholic Apologetics International
Catholic apologist and author. Seventeen years a Protestant, back in the Catholic Church since 1992, defending it since 1993.
Told from his books, debates and talks. The quotes are his own words.
Robert Sungenis was baptized in the Catholic Church in 1955 and confirmed in 1968. He grew up with the Latin Mass, and then the Novus Ordo.
The turn came in his freshman year of college. Alone in his dorm room with a Good News for Modern Man Bible, he read Matthew 11:25 to 28 before he went to sleep: “Come unto Me, all you that labor and are heavy laden.” He had not gone looking for anything. He woke up the next morning, in his words, “totally different.”
“If this book can do that to me, I want to study this book the rest of my life, which I have done.”
For about six months he went back to the Catholic Church, and it made more sense to him than before. But he had started listening to Protestant radio preachers, and they told him the Catholic Church had too much tradition and did not go by the Bible. He wanted to follow the truth wherever it was.
He left in 1975. For the next seventeen years he was, as he puts it, a card-carrying Protestant: Presbyterian, Baptist and independent Bible churches, mostly Calvinistic, and he wanted nothing to do with Catholics. He took a BA in Religion at George Washington University and an MA in Religion at Westminster Theological Seminary.
“I know how they think, where they’re coming from ... and that all helps as a Catholic apologist.”
In 1992 someone asked him a question he could not answer. If the Bible is your only authority, where does the Bible say so? He could point to verses that call Scripture authoritative. He could not find one that calls it the only authority.
“That question rocked me quite a bit and that opened up the door for me to go examine a lot of other things in the Catholic Church.”
Friends brought him Cardinal Gibbons's The Faith of Our Fathers, an 1876 defense of the Catholic faith that goes through the Eucharist, the sacraments, Mary, indulgences and purgatory. Reading it as a Bible scholar, he kept finding that there was something to the answers. Within a few days he knew he wanted to be Catholic again, and in 1992 he came back.
A year later he started Catholic Apologetics International.
“I wanted to help other Catholics who had departed from their faith to be able to do the same, so I started a Catholic apologetics organization in 1993 and have been working at it ever since.”
Pick a year to jump to it, or read straight down.
Raised Catholic
1955
Born into the Catholic faith and baptized as an infant.
1968
Confirmed in the Church he was raised in.
Protestant years
1975
Protestant radio preachers convinced him that the Catholic Church did not go by the Bible. He left it and joined the Protestant churches.
1980
Studied 1975 to 1980, with a year at Washington Bible College along the way.
His degrees in full1982
Two years at the Reformed seminary in Philadelphia, 1980 to 1982.
Catholic apologist
1992
Asked where the Bible says it is the only authority, he could not find the verse. He read Cardinal Gibbons’s The Faith of Our Fathers, and within a few days knew he wanted to be Catholic again.
1993
An organization to teach and defend the Catholic faith, mainly from the Bible. He has worked at it ever since.
1997
His book on justification, and the multi-author book on sola scriptura that he edited. Both from Queenship Publishing.
About Not By Faith Alone1998
A television series on EWTN built on Not By Faith Alone.
1999
A second EWTN series, this time with Patrick Madrid, answering the Protestant claim that Scripture alone is the Christian’s only authority.
1999
One of several debates with the Reformed apologist. Others were on justification, predestination, papal infallibility, the Assumption and purgatory.
The debate2006
A 700-page dissertation on geocentrism earns a PhD in Religious Studies from Calamus International University, which is not US-accredited. It is published late that year as Galileo Was Wrong.
The degree and the accreditation question2008
He had written to the USCCB and to the Vatican asking them to remove one sentence on the Old Covenant. In June 2008 the bishops voted 231 to 14 to take it out, and the Vatican approved the change.
The Catechism and the covenant2014
A theatrical documentary on the Copernican principle. He was executive producer and is in the film.
About the film2015
A four-and-a-half-hour documentary on the history of cosmology, which he directed.
About the film2024
His book on the Old Covenant and recent Catholic documents, a subject he says he has followed for forty years.
About the bookBy his own count he has written over 50 books for four publishers and hundreds of articles. He has taken part in more than 100 debates, recorded and unrecorded, and has been on CNN, the BBC and EWTN.
He answers Protestant arguments from the Bible, which he spent seventeen years reading on the other side. The Not By books take on justification, sola scriptura and the Mass. His four-volume commentary on the Douay-Rheims New Testament is exegeted from the original Greek and Latin.
He has debated Reformed and evangelical apologists, James White among them, on justification, the Mass, the papacy, Mary and purgatory.
Galileo Was Wrong began as his doctoral dissertation and grew to three volumes. He argues that the Earth does not move. He produced The Principle and directed Journey to the Center of the Universe.
The evidence he argues fromHis letters about one sentence in the 2006 Adult Catechism ended with the US bishops removing it in 2008. Since then he has written on the Old Covenant and the Jews, and on Fatima.
“The true motivation ... was to defend the Church’s decision against Galileo so the Church would once again show itself to be guided by the Holy Spirit into all truth.”
Eight to start with: the three Not By books, the first Galileo volume, the New Testament commentary and his newer work on the covenant, Fatima and the flat Earth.
Much of what is said about him online concerns his doctorate and his view that the Earth does not move. Two pages set out that record plainly, including where his critics are right.
Ask about the faith, Scripture or his work.
