Robert Sungenis

Robert A. Sungenis (born 1955) is an American Catholic apologist and advocate of the pseudoscientific belief that the Earth is the center of the universe. He has made statements about Jews and Judaism which have been criticized as being antisemitic, which he denies. Sungenis is a member of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, a Catholic Young Earth creationist group. Sungenis was brought up in a Roman Catholic household and converted to Protestantism as a young man. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in religion from George Washington University in 1979 and a Master of Arts in theology from Westminster Theological Seminary in 1982. He reverted to Roman Catholicism in 1992. In 2006 he received a Ph.D. in religious studies from the Calamus International University, an unaccredited distance-learning institution incorporated in the Republic of Vanuatu. After his conversion back to Roman Catholicism, Sungenis became 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. Sungenis' writings include antisemitic ideas, sources, and claims about the Jews and Judaism and have been 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 were murdered during the Holocaust and that demographic statistics show no real difference in the number of Jews living before and after World War II (see Historical Jewish population comparisons). 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.