Robert Sungenis

Biography

Robert Sungenis was brought up in a Roman Catholic household and converted to become a Protestant as a young man. He obtained his B.A. in religion from George Washington University in 1979, an M.A. in theology from Westminster Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian and Reformed Christian seminary located in Glenside, Pennsylvania, in 1982.

He converted back to Roman Catholicism in 1992.

In 2006 he earned a Ph.D. in religious studies from the Calamus International University, an unaccredited distance-learning institution incorporated in the Republic of Vanuatu.

Traditionalist Catholic apologetics

After his conversion back to Roman Catholicism, Sungenis became known as a Traditionalist Catholic. He wrote Not by faith alone, a book of apologetics, explaining his view of the Catholic Church's doctrine of justification and his critique of the Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone.

Jews and Judaism

Sungenis' writings include antisemitic ideas, sources, and claims about the Jewish people and Judaism and have been sharply criticized by fellow Catholics and by the Southern Poverty Law Center, as has the publishing company he founded and uses to publish his books, Catholic Apologetics International. In 2002, he said it was a fact that no one had ever proven that 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust and that demographic statistics show no real difference in the number of Jews living before and after World War II. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he also "repeated a series of ancient anti-Semitic canards" and later wrote about the involvement of Jews and Israel in a Zionist Satanic conspiracy aimed at Satan ruling the world.

In 2006 Sungenis made comments on his Bellarmine Theological Forum about the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults (USCCA) which at that time read, "Thus the covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them." Sungenis believed it implied that the Jews can be saved without believing in Jesus, and people who read the forum began repeating his complaint to Catholic authorities. In the summer of 2008, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) voted to remove the sentence and replace it with a quote from the Epistle to the Romans: "To the Jewish people, whom God first chose to hear his word, belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ". Jewish leaders complained that the change was antisemitic. Monsignor Daniel Kutys said that the sentence was changed because of the confusion Sungenis' blog was generating, and also said that the change was made to skirt the issue rather address it directly.

By 2008 his local bishop had instructed him to stop writing about Jews and to remove the name "Catholic" from his blog.

In 2014 Sungenis stated that he would no longer write about Jewish issues that are political in nature and that he would remove content about Jews and Judaism, but he still maintained that the Jews as an ethnic group do not have a covenant with God.

Geocentrism

According to Sungenis, he became interested in the pseudoscientific belief of geocentrism around 2002, after he read the book, Geocentricity by Gerardus D Bouw. Sungenis became an advocate for the idea by 2006. He believes that the earth does not rotate and has offered $1,000 via his group, Catholic Apologetics International, to anyone who could prove that the Earth moves around the Sun.

By 2011 he was the leader of a small group of conservative Roman Catholics who were advocating for the Roman Catholic Church to go back to the stance it took in condemning Galileo, and who viewed the heliocentric model as part of a conspiracy to undermine the authority of the church in society more generally. He self-published a three-volume book called Galileo Was Wrong and runs a blog called Galileo Was Wrong in which he promotes these ideas.

In 2014, Sungenis, along with Rick Delano, was an executive producer of The Principle, a documentary which advocates for his ideas about geocentrism. The movie features interviews with Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, Max Tegmark, Julian Barbour, and George F. R. Ellis, and was narrated by Kate Mulgrew, and was briefly in the news in 2014 when Mulgrew and the physicists said that the filmmakers did not honestly explain the purpose of their film to them. The release date of the film was October 24, 2014, when it was screened at the Marcus Addison Cinema in Addison, Illinois, according to the distributor Rocky Mountain Pictures. As of April 30, 2015 the film had grossed $89,543.