Paul Thigpen: A Paragon of Humility and Christian Charity

“I love you, brother.” That’s how Paul Thigpen would always end his time with me, whether at a restaurant for lunch in northern Georgia or after one of our periodic 30-minute phone calls. As noted by a priest (one of 12!) who concelebrated his March 2 funeral Mass, Paul was a warm, ever-gracious man, one whom many folk described as a best friend.

We struck up a friendship almost a decade ago, after Paul read a satirical article of mine imagining how corporate media would report and comment on the ministry of Christ. When he reached out, I recognized his name but couldn’t quite place it. It wasn’t until after a Google search that I realized a man with more than 50 books to his name liked my writing. Since then, whenever I was in Georgia visiting my wife’s family, Paul and I would grab lunch, typically at establishments offering authentic Southern cuisine (he introduced me to fried gator).

Paul was a paragon of humility and Christian charity. Our conversations always gravitated toward me—what was I writing on, how was my spiritual life? Even when I wasn’t in Georgia, he regularly checked in on me. I often wondered how such a busy and important man could make time for a lowly writer such as myself, especially given that more than once I forgot about our scheduled phone calls. But as I learned at his funeral, this was his modus operandi with many, many other people. He was one of the holiest men I’ve ever known—always praying and fasting, often for me. But he was also brilliant, with a deep knowledge of theology and literature.

Obituaries of Paul have focused attention on his last major scholarly project, in which he argued that the possible (in his view, probable) existence of extraterrestrial life in no way undermined the doctrines of the Catholic Faith. With no disrespect to Paul, I think it’s unfortunate he’s been posthumously pegged as the “Catholic scholar of aliens,” given the amazing scope of his more-than-four-decade oeuvre. Labeling his legacy this way is a bit like measuring the career of Steven Spielberg by E.T.

When Paul told me that he was writing a book about aliens, I think he could tell I was restraining my inclination to scoff (I was, and remain, highly skeptical that there is indeed extraterrestrial life). Paul took no offense and explained that the book derived both from his personal interest as well as a deep concern that some Catholics might lose their faith if, one day, humanity were to encounter extraterrestrials. That was quintessential Paul, willing to engage with any intellectual topic if he thought it might save souls. I know the book undermined his credibility with some Catholics, including prominent ones with whom he had previously professionally collaborated. 

Paul was prolific but in a way that always seemed to foreground the person of Christ rather than a personal brand. Since his death, I’ve spoken with multiple Catholics who confessed ignorance of Paul’s work only to realize, once I started rattling off titles, that they had read his books. 

His Manual for Spiritual Warfare and Saints Who Saw Hell, among others, are modern classics, the former serving as an invaluable spiritual help for Catholics and the latter offering an impressive refutation of those inclined to think universalism is compatible with Catholic teaching and tradition. God’s Wildest Wonderment of All is, in turn, a beautiful and profound illustrated children’s book (and, as Paul told me, by an amusing coincidence the blond boy in the book bears a striking resemblance to what he looked like as a child). 

And let there be no doubt—the man could write. Consider the following opening paragraph from his conversion testimonial in Patrick Madrid’s Surprised by Truth, in which he vividly describes his first exposure as a child to an image of the crucified Christ:

I was quite young the first time I saw him, so I don’t remember where it happened. But I do remember being terrified by the sight: that tortured man, thorn-crowned, blood-bathed, forsaken. The sculptor had spared no crease of agony; the painter, no crimson stroke. He was a nightmare in wood.

We should expect no less from the graduate of Yale (where he roomed with Protestant author and essayist Walter Russell Mead). Paul once told me that while at Yale he would open doors for his progressive female classmates, claiming that they had to allow him to do it out of respect for his Southern culture. In time, he would complete a Ph.D. from Emory in historical theology.

Yet Paul never let his intellect get in the way of his talent of relating to everyday Catholics. I think much of that stemmed from his own conversion experience. Though raised Presbyterian, in grade school he unknowingly flirted with the occult (and, by extension, the demonic) through experimentation with parapsychology. As he relates in his aforementioned testimonial, that dalliance almost killed him. For Paul, knowledge of Satan preceded knowledge of God.

His utopian liberalism vitiated by witnessing (and vainly trying to stop) a race riot at his Georgia high school, Paul returned to the Protestantism of his youth, though soon oriented in a charismatic direction. He spoke in tongues and toured as a musician in a missionary evangelical rock band in Europe. He became an associate pastor of a charismatic congregation. Paul argued that his Pentecostal experience, in certain respects, acted as a “gateway drug” to the Catholic Church because of its viscerally embodied form of Christianity. He contrasted that with other forms of Protestantism that are almost Gnostic in their emphasis on spiritual knowledge possessed by an elect few coupled with a certain antipathy toward the body and the material. 

I also appreciate how Paul interpreted Christian history. Rather than serving as an obstacle, the history of the Church reinforced his belief in the universality of sin and the sovereignty of grace. He perceived that the same struggles that defined the Catholic Church define all Protestant movements (Wesleyanism, for example, served as a spiritual antidote to the arid rigidity of Calvinism). Pace the Reformers, “Erasmus and Newman taught me that the Church is a maturing organism whose life span stretches across the centuries—not an archaeological expedition always searching for fossils to help reconstruct a primitive campsite,” he wrote.

When Paul converted in the 1990s, his career suffered, including business relationships in the evangelical publishing world. He gave up his pastoral ordination and association with a ministry network on whose board of governors he served. Yet, in time, new opportunities arose in Catholic academia, journalism, and publishing. 

In 2008, he was appointed to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ National Advisory Council. He not only authored but edited many books, including at least one by Scott Hahn: A Father Who Keeps His Promises. A great mentor to me, he graciously provided comments on my first book and offered blurbs for my second and third. 

I spoke with Paul on the phone during this past Christmas holiday, and I looked forward to seeing him in Georgia this upcoming summer. I could hardly have believed it would be the last time we spoke. Yet if there was anyone who lived every day ready, joyfully eager to meet his Savior, it was Paul. To play off an old Southern spiritual, “Hallelujah,” Paul was ready to go.

When Paul and his family entered the Church more than three decades ago, he related that a “flood of joy” washed over him: 

I threw back my head and began to laugh. It was a profound, tear-soaked laughter, a laughter of liberation and relief, the kind I hadn’t experienced since that day, twenty years before, when the Holy Spirit had washed me clean inside. 

I have strong confidence Paul experienced that same laughter when his spirit departed his mortal body to await the resurrection of the dead. Until then, Paul, I love you, brother.