 Hi everybody. Welcome again to this next Handbooks podcast. We've done a number of these and we feature different authors of different books who we've published through Handbooks. And today I'm really excited to have with us the great Paul Thigpen, who's done a bunch of books, many of which I've read. I've seen him many times on EWTN, heard him many times on the radio, watched him, heard him talk about his different books. And this is actually the first time we've met. I've never actually met before until right now. And we're going to be talking today about his book from 2019, Saints Who Saw Hell, which is fascinating. I didn't even know about it until, very embarrassingly, until a few months ago. And I thought, I don't know how I missed this, but it's a wonderful book. So we're going to talk about that and his other works. But for right now, Paul, thank you very much. Thanks for joining us. Oh, it's a great pleasure to be here, Paul. Thanks. Thanks for the invitation. So tell us a little bit first about yourself as an author and what the books that you've done in the past, you've done a lot of books, right? Yeah, yeah. I'm working on a couple for TAN right now that will be, will they be 58 and 59? Wow. I've written that published and probably a contract for number 60. But I've been doing it a long time. I started, got my, my start in journalism back in the gosh, late 70s, published my first piece. And I've done other things. I've been a college professor of theology and worked as a catechist and full time on Paris gas was a process of pastor before we became Catholic. I've still been writing all along. So it's a bunch of books, but I've been writing for a long time. So people think I've done a lot of books. I've done about 20 folks. All right. He's got me tripled. All right. He's running circles around me here. Now, now, so hold on a second. Let me back up a couple of these things. So you were a journalist and when did you start in journalism right out of college, maybe? Or when was that? Yeah, started writing, not as a, like a professional journalist, but as a freelancer. And, and that kind of led to my first book. I was writing at that time for a magazine with NAF press, the publisher of the Navigators, evangelical Protestant publisher. And excuse me, that led to some new connections and I wrote, began writing for their publications and finally some books. But also I was, it started out with kids books, actually wrote the kids books before I ever wrote books for adults. And once I became Catholic, it was kind of an easy transition. My personal testimony of becoming Catholic is the first chapter in the first book by Pat Madrid called Surprise by Truth. There are several volumes. Those are wonderful. Well, he's got to use those books for so many things. And so anyway, but my, my testimony in that book kind of got the attention of some folks who said, why don't you write for us. So it was a pretty easy transition, which was good, because since I couldn't be a pastor anymore and I had to figure out how I was going to make a limit. Well, and I think that's, that's where I first probably came across you. Well, maybe, but I'm a convert as well. And those books, Surprise by Truth, which are, which are taken from the C.S. Lewis phrase, right? Surprise by Joy. And they, they are, you know, those are, I think, the single best volumes of apologetics that have been done. I mean, there are individual memoirs that are very influential. I mean, we think of Kimberly and Scott Hahn, Rome Sweet Home. But, but the Surprise by Truth series is just fantastic. And, and I, yeah, you're the very, you're the very first entry in the first volume. In the first volume. Right. Wow. His open arms welcomed me, this title of it, about how the crucifix attracted me before, even from the time I was a kid. And you, and you had been, so you were a Protestant, what, which denomination? I like to say I was a walking ecumenical movement, or I still am. Sure. So I was, let's see, born into a family that was practicing Lutheran, eventually baptized the Presbyterian church as a kid, became an atheist at the age of 12, and was that for six years through junior and senior high school, traumatic conversion experience at the end of my senior year. Then after that, I was really looking for a home. I ended up being part of Assemblies of God and two non-denominational churches and youth minister for a Baptist church and Sunday school teacher for a physical church. And so almost every major denomination I was involved in, and finally. This is a typical, this is a typical story, right? And I mean, I'm a convert as well. Although actually, I'm technically a revert because I was brought up in the church in the, in the 70s, the Dark Ages, as Robbie George and I come. So I became an atheist like most people probably do when they went off to college, right? Yours became an atheist at the age of 12. Hold on. I want to revisit that in a second. And then after that, so I became a Christian through evangelicals and you just sort of church hop, right? You go to the church with the best sermons, the best music contemporary or traditional, right? The best youth groups. And you're often really not very creedal or connected to a particular denomination. And for many of us, it's that lack of authority and that sort of religious relativism that eventually kind of beckons you home to Rome. And maybe that's what happened with you. That was part of it. Part of it was that I started to, well, first of all, my undergrad degree, yeah, it was in, in religious studies, but I really made it kind of a focus on church history. And that began to plant the seeds. And as, you know, Don Garnell Newman once said, to be deep in history, it seems to be Protestant. And then my master and PhD program at Emory were in church history. And the more I read, especially the early church fathers, the more I was convicted. St. Augustine, especially. Yeah. Yeah, the Newman quote, right? The more you read the church fathers, the needs to be Protestant, right? Yes. Yes. And did you say, did you say you went to Yale undergrad? Undergrad. Okay. And then Emory for the master's in PhD, right? And in church history. Now, so it's interesting you started Lutheran, which a lot of us call sort of Catholic light, right? I mean, the Lutherans, this is the irony of Martin Luther being the cause of the separation and the reformation as the Lutherans, they are probably closer to us than anybody else, right? Consubstantiation, more sacraments than any of the other denominations are at least closer to our seven sacraments. But, but you, but you became an atheist at age 12. That's, that's pretty young. Well, this, the stuff I was reading, I had a seventh grade science teacher, I mean, sorry, not science, a history teacher who at the beginning of my seventh grade experience put some Voltaire into my hands and said, you know, read this. And I, you know, I was young and foolish and, and I suspect part of it at a level I didn't realize was kind of my rebellion against, you know, adolescent rebellion. Of course, this is back in, there've been 69 drugs and alcohol everywhere, other stuff, but I wasn't willing to turn my mind over to any of that stuff. So I think what happened is that that's kind of what, how my rebellion took its, its, you know, version of what, what, what it did. But yeah, after reading, especially Voltaire and some others, I just said, oh my gosh, it's not real. I was genuinely convinced. That's one of the first worst things you could do is turn to Voltaire. You would have been better off turning on, turning on in Laguna, DeVita or Led Zeppelin or something like that. Aaron Burr, after he shot Thomas Jefferson, said, said, I should have read Les Voltaire. Marx's father, Karl Marx's father read Voltaire to him when he was a young man. Right. It's just one of the worst things. Voltaire, Voltaire is so destructive. So, so that, so interesting that that was your form of rebellion then in your teen years. And, and I, so I have to ask if you don't mind, you said you had a dramatic conversion around the age of 18. Yes, several things happened. I don't want to take too, too much time with it, but I had after Voltaire become like a perfect little enlightenment kid, you know, convinced that, that we were not only that Christianity wasn't true, but that if we could just form ourselves properly in education, that we could perfect ourselves. So believe in the perfectability of humankind. And went through a period then, I'm in the deep South, I'm still in Georgia, in Georgia, I've lived in other places, but I was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, where school desegregation came about. And even though it had gone well for a couple of years, and I was, I went to a high school, it was all black until I and my friends went there and had this great experience of community building. I got involved in student government by my senior year, I was convinced we were going to, you know, all this, all this other stuff. I've been thinking about said it was stuff that could be overcome by our efforts. And so we were building a biracial harmonious biracial community. And then a senior year, soon, body got swapped around short story as we had writing terrible writing, friends of mine with black and white out to kill each other right in front of my eyes. And it just I remember coming home that day, it just shattered everything. This idol of humanity that I put up on a pedestal was just smashed. And I thought, yeah, none of that's true either. But then I had So it became a Calvinist. Well, no, no. The total depravity of man right before you there. Right, right, right. But what happened was I had friends, you know, began to come alongside me pretty forward with me. I had several adults that I really respected who are just very vibrant Christians. I had some what I call experiments in prayer connected to the first first thing we just talked about the few weeks later, I'm out on campus, welcome to the Christian friend. We come around the corner and we see a mob of a group of whites on one side, blacks on the other. They've got this is the day before schools had, you know, metal detectors, they have chains and tart tools and knives and stuff screaming, cursing at each other across a strip of grass. Really, it was about to happen again. I just can't take this. My friend next to me said, I don't know about you, but I'm going to pray. And she dropped her knees and we were at least 100 feet from them. They weren't even looking at us. So our behavior wasn't influencing them. And she dropped her knees and began to pray. And Paul, I had a dilemma. You know, I didn't believe in God, but I didn't want to see my friends suffer. I just love them so much. And you didn't want to call in Voltaire either at that moment. So I finally said was, you know, okay, I'm just going to humble myself and pray. Maybe it'll do something. And I knelt to and I said, God, if there is a God, this can't be your will to do something. And Paul, the most amazing thing happened. If I'd written it in a novel later, nobody would have believed it. The others would have said, take it out because it's not believable. So get up from prayer. And all of a sudden, somebody on one side of the mob begins to laugh. And it becomes a belly laugh. And it's this contagious laugh for all of a sudden everybody around him is belly laughing. And then it jumps across the strip of grass to the other side. They start belly laughing. And as they're belly laughing, all the anger trains out, you can see them just kind of go and they finally shrug their shoulders and turn around and walk down. Now, if I, you know, if all of a sudden a SWAT team had descended between them and stopped them later on, I could have said, well, it's just a coincidence. Somebody already notified the police. It just happened to be right after I prayed, right? What do you do with that? You know, it just, it was so obvious. And I could tell you other stories, but so what did you do with that? At that moment, you realized it, right? Well, I said, okay, this is, I'm going to take this seriously. And I started going back to the Gospels to read, but it was only one of several things. The other, I'll just say briefly, and that's one reason why I've written about spiritual warfare so much is that I had gotten involved in the occult during those six years. And one night in my senior year, not long after this, I had a, I will go into detail, but a terrible, terrible encounter where all of a sudden I realized that up until that time, I didn't think there was a spiritual world that didn't think there was a life or death of human spirit, everything. I was a materialist philosophy. But I thought maybe we could learn more about this scientific viewpoint and maybe there's something going on that's actually a normal capacity of human beings that hadn't been discovered yet. And I see for my seventh grade science project, going back when I was 12, wrote off to Duke University, they used to have an institute for parapsychology and asked for testing materials to the, got a blue ribbon on the project, but it was a short step from that kind of thing into seances and media boards and stuff. But anyway, one night, one night, during my senior year, they nearly killed him. And it, I escaped. That's a very dramatic story. I won't take up time with it, but basically by the word speaking to me, focus on the cross and I seen a cross and focus on it. But after that, I had to go back. Have you written about that? I referred to it briefly and surprised by truth story, but not the details. But anyway, it's, and that's, that's the thing that motivated more than any, you know, I'm thinking, okay, it's, there is something else out there that my tidy little enlightenment worldview does not, you know, account for, I better find out what's, what's going on. And if, if there is a devil and there's no God, I'm really in trouble. And so I went, yeah, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, and so one thing in particular that the, the thing that came after me that night had said to me, and I was near water, never home. We lived on the water. I'm going to throw you into the water. That's so clear. And I knew what that meant because I couldn't swim even though we lived on the water. And then the thing took over me. It took two guys to hold me down. It's just very dramatic thing. So at that night after I'm thinking about all this, I just said, Oh my gosh, I remember a story from the gospel when I was a kid where the demon possessed boys father said, it throws him into the water and the fire and into the fire trying to kill over this. It was the same thing. And other other things happened to a guy who had been with me that night told me one of the guys is with me said, Oh, I've just happened to my girlfriend once. And so I asked him, you know, is your girlfriend religious? You go to church? She said, Oh, yeah, she goes to church. She goes to the church of Satan. She's a witch. What century am I living in? Oh, no. But anyway, I'm probably telling too much, but no, it's just so much. It's riveting. I just reached over into my bookshelf and grabbed your book of spiritual warfare. And, you know, I, this is published by Tan. And I go to this all the time. In fact, I keep it on this page, prayers for the home and the family. And anytime I just kind of feel anything, any sort of dark darkness or whatever unease, I go to that and I walk around the house and I pray, I pray those prayers. But that you need to write about that. And also, have you, have you written about the moment with the belly laugh and segregation of the two sides pitted against one another? Again, I did refer to it and surprised by truth. I don't remember how many details I wrote. Tan's talked to me about doing a spiritual memoir, which I'd like to do, just including all those kinds of stories, but I got a few others. I got to get them first. Right, right. Yeah. And I'll revisit those toward the end of the talk. By the way, now I'm going to read the surprise by truth thing tonight. I'm going to go grab that, Michelle, after we're done talking. I'm going to read that. So all right, just fascinating. So you've done all these different books. By the way, do you have a favorite among them? People ask me the same thing. I'm not really. I don't know for just for the subject matter, the one called the biblical names of Jesus, beautiful, powerful portraits of Christ. And sure, right, writing that so much. And I was so nourished spiritually by going deep into a number of names from scripture about who Jesus is, and just rediscovering stuff and learning new things that helped me to see him in a whole new way. That's very, that's very innovative. That's, yeah, that's very interesting. And how many of these have been done through town, through 10 books? Oh, golly. A lot. Six or eight, maybe something like that. Okay. And you were and you were editor at 10 books for a while at one point. Now, which, which years were those roughly? Oh gosh, and you're going to ask that. I think it was like 2013 through 2016, maybe something like that. I have to look. Yeah. And part of it, I love the folks there and I'm still publishing with them. I, you know, love to see them and love to be with them. It was just that I felt this pull back toward parish ministry, which I had been doing until actually until the end of May when I retired, but just to be one on one with folks and sure, I still always love to write and want to write and believe I have a mission to, but, but being in the trenches, you know, with folks. Yeah. And it's hard. I mean, I'm doing this right now with Patrick O'Hearn, the new editor and I'm editing some books while I'm also under contract for a couple of others. And as you know, it's hard to write books while you're editing books. It's, it's, it really, really is. It's hard to separate the two, especially if, if your natural inclination is a writer. And, and for me, I'm always writing articles and that too. So it's, it's really, it's really hard to do both. And, and I've found that it's kind of weird, right? But the, but the very best editors don't publish books usually. Yeah, it's exactly right. It's kind of like, it's kind of like, yeah, my dad used to talk about guys, guys who are golfers, you know, why are the, why, why aren't the best golfers, why are they the teachers, right? It's kind of, or hitting coaches in baseball, right? You know, who's the hitting coach and never heard of them before. You think the guy would hit 400 a couple of times, right? So all right, now, now, so this book, Saints Who Saw Hell, this came out in 2019. And it says Saints Who Saw Hell, another Catholic witnesses to the fate of the dam. And this, this is a book that, you know, it's, it's, you know, got to borrow a phrase, right? Scary as hell. I mean, you read about this and anybody who, who doesn't think about this stuff, or who, or who doesn't fear death and, and, you know, what could, what could happen? Read this book. I mean, it is really frightening stuff. This is, this is visions of actual Saints. So you start with an introduction, hell matters. And then two chapters after that, then part one is visions of the Saints, which goes from chapter three through 14. It's really the heart of the book from St. John Bosco, St. Teresa of Abilah, down to Pope St. Gregory, Alphonsus Ligori in between St. Hildegarde of Bingen, Teresa of Abilah, Catherine of Siena, St. Faustina. We're actually recording this today on the feast day of St. Faustina in the middle. Blessed Anne, Catherine, Emmerich. By the way, I don't, I'm looking for a book right now. I've got volume one, volume one, volume two. Do you have any idea why she's not a Saint? I do not understand the visions that she had, the stigmata that she had, the crowns of thorns and everything else. It's just, just unbelievable the life, the life that she had. She died 200 years ago at this point. You know, you know, canonizations can often have all kinds of political things. You know, the fact that she was German, it could have been a while where that kind of delayed because of the world wars or something. I'm just speculating. Also, you know, some of the controversy over some of her works and that some people will take it as gospel truth and, and there are things in there that seem to be historical anomalies and things so that there had to be a clarification on the part of the Vatican that her cause for canonization is not an imprimatur for her works, especially since there's some suggestion that her spiritual director who was also recording these things that he changed something. So that's not to take away from it, but just to say, it's the kind of thing that could slow down canonization process, I guess. Well, and, and with her, the three days of darkness perhaps, right, that, that, that could be it. And okay, so I was not sure who to start with first, but let's take a look at her. So she was 1774 to 1824, German, Augustinian nun. And she was she she had the stigmata on her body. Also, not just on her hands, but, but, but also on her chest of all things. And also the crown of thorns as well, which she said was so bad, she couldn't she couldn't even rest her head in her pillow. That's how bad it was. And at first, these were invisible, like, like Catherine of Siena, and I guess like Faustina as well. But they later became visible. And this was extremely well documented. I mean, there's just there's no question, the German scientists and doctors who were who were in her room all the time. And the visitors and it just, I mean, that probably tormented the poor woman more than anything else, right? Like Padre Pio that just constant, right? Here's a book on Padre Pio under investigation, the constant, constant, constant, constant affirming of this. But among the things that she said here. So she talks about Jesus entering hell, the city of hell. And I'll skip to kind of the end of it. She talks about seeing hell. Many were chained down in a circle that was placed around other circles. In the center of hell, I saw a dark and horrible looking abyss into this Lucifer was cast after being first strongly secured with chains. This is on page 49. Thick clouds of sulfurous black smoke rose from its fearful depths and enveloped his frightening form in its dismal folds. God himself had decreed this arrangement. I was likewise told, and this Paul fascinated me, and I wrote a piece on this for 10 books, new blog, which is being run by JP Sonan. Well, I wrote a piece called unchained. And she writes, I was likewise told, if I remember correctly, that the devil will be unchained for a time 50 or 60 years before the year of Christ 2000. Now, she's writing this 200 years ago. And maybe this might be one of the reasons that her cause for canonization hasn't been approved. But that would be the devil being unchained around 1940, 1950. Oh, my gosh, let me just think about what happened during those years. It's the starters of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Right. Oh, there's other things, but then, you know, the advance of Marxism, what happened? Russia and China after that. Oh, my goodness. Oh, I don't know. It's, yeah. And she says here, the dates of many other events were pointed out to me that I do not now remember. But a certain number of demons are to be let loose much earlier than Lucifer in order to tempt men and to serve as instruments of the divine vengeance. I should think that some must be loosened even in the present day, and others will be set free in a short time. By the way, since you mentioned Marxism, she died, she died, Marx is born in 1818. And this, she was alive at that time, right? So, I mean, I don't know, I can't confirm that. I wrote a book called The Devil and Carl Marx, but I have to hear about what I can say and what I can't say, right? I can't, I can't. I'm sure they were contemporaries. Yeah. Anyway, they were contemporaries. Yeah. And she said, it would be utterly impossible for me to describe all the things that were shown to me. Their number was so great that I could not organize them sufficiently and to find and make them intelligible. But what's really interesting about this, Paul, too, is that this idea of the devil being chained for this period, I mean, this is consistent with the Book of Revelation. Exactly. Yeah. The language is the same there. These chain for a thousand years, and then shortly before the end, he's released. Yeah. So, yeah, for our Protestant friends, which you and I were, right? The Revelation section 20 verses one through seven talks about the devil being unchained for a period for a period of 1000 years. And so if I could bounce back here, and this relates to the piece that I wrote on your book for the for the for the Tan website, St. Hildegarde of Bingen, who was just a just a brilliant woman, a doctor of the church. I mean, every feminist in the world ought to know who Hildegarde of Bingen is, right? Yeah. And she she lived German as well, Benedictine, born in the year 1098, died in 1179. So this is on page 39. She had a vision of hell. And going through this, some souls in purgatory page 41. All right, here we go. Page 42. Think about how this might connect to the Book of Revelation, the devil being chained. And Anne Catherine Embrick saying the devil would be unchained for a period of 50 years prior to the year 2000. So Hildegarde of Bingen writing in the 11 hundreds said this, a chain was riveted around the neck of the worm. She just she describes the devil as this big, ugly, monstrous looking worm, binding its hands and feet as well and secured and securely fastened to a rock in the abyss. In this way, the monster was restrained so that could not move around as its wicked will wished. Tongues of fire issued from its mouth, dividing four ways, one part ascended to the clouds, another breath forth among the people of the world, another among spiritual people, and the last descended into the abyss. So following this timeline here in the 11 hundreds, the devil is still chained, right? But according to Anne Catherine Emmerick's chronology, 1940 to 1950, the devil is unchained. So if all of this adds up, and there's a thousand year period, and these two saints are right with their visions, we're in this period right now, if they're correct. Yeah. And if it's a literal thousand years, that's always the question in Revelation. St. Augustine taught that like so many numbers there that this rounded number of thousand met a really long time. And he thought the thousand years referred to the age of the church, that at the time of the crucifixion and resurrection, the devil was bound. And through the age of the church, he remains bound, he can't do everything he'd like to do, but all kinds of things he was up to in BC days, especially among the pagans that now he can't do. But that when it comes close to the time of the end, we say Augustine interpreted that passage was that God will release him again for a short time. And so the thousand is an exact, it's just the age of the church. But you know, it was that was kind of his his interpretation. It's it's been interpreted in other ways too. And the so of all of these, do you do you have I was gonna say, do you have a particular favorite? You know, that's kind of a silly way to explain this, but well, I could say I have a favorite visionary of these, of these, not so much, excuse me, the vision, but itself. But Justin, the Saint Jacinta, at Fatima, because such a, you know, sweet innocent girl, she's a child. And she's allowed, you know, they're allowed to see this horrible vision of hell when they, which they talk about, you know, dam souls like snowflakes descending into the fire. But the amazing thing is, and she's such a good example for us is that after she had that vision, then she, her, her life changed in such a way that she was continually praying and making sacrifices for the souls who could be who are in danger of damnation. And she would, even little sacrifices like a child would do, she would, she, she go out to, you know, they were shepherds, she go out in the middle of the day and the heat of the day, rather than drinking the water to make a sacrifice for the souls in danger. She would give her water or her, even her lunch to the sheep and things like that. That's a child. It's a child doing that. And it was always, just to say as, you know, says later just, she was always saying to us, pray for, pray for the people in danger of hell, pray for them. You remember what we saw? And, and so I do have a favorite visionary among all these, that's, what a, oh my goodness, what's a, what a powerful thing. So it was that indelibly marked in their mind, in their soul. And, and they saw this, that summer of 1917, right? So the Blessed Mother first appeared in Fatima, May 13, 1917. And then you have the several months in between. And then the miracle of the sun, October 13, 1917. And yes, so this, so Jacinto Lucia, Francisco, and this is on page 61, she, our Lady continued, she said to us, sacrifice yourselves for sinners and say many times, especially whenever you make some sacrifice, oh Jesus, it is for love of you, for the conversion of sinners and a reparation for the sins committed against the immaculate heart of Mary. And, you know, for non-Catholics listening or familiar with the rosary, every time you do a decade of the rosary, you end with a Fatima prayer, right? Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins. And so that is, that, that comes from this. That's, that's how profound this was. And, and, and as they said, and this was a question that I wanted to ask you, they said, there are so many people going into hell, like you said, almost like snowflakes following into hell. One thing I tried to discern from this book or take away from it, I didn't get a clear answer. And it's okay, you weren't aiming for this, but it's how hard to get into or easy to get into, right? Well, the scripture says that the way, you know, the way of damnation is wide and many of there are, they go and the way to salvation is narrow. I don't know how else to interpret that at the very least. But even if I'm going to say that says something definite about the actual numbers who end up in both places, it sure sounds like that it's a broad way means an easy way where a lot of people can go narrow way means it's, it's harder to get to. And I think that's the case in our lives, isn't it? I mean, we're always having to fight against it. We're always having to make a choice day after day for God. And it seems like, at least according to some of these visionaries, some of these mystics, that that you're given a final chance until the very end, right? And in some cases, some of them have said, might be Faustina, I'm not sure, that there are some people until the last moment can ask for forgiveness, but some are so obstinate, so hard-hearted, right? That they, that they refuse, right? They refuse to believe. And those are the ones that are really doomed. And of course, as Catholics, we believe a lot of those in between, I guess, so to speak, there's a purgatory, right? For, for, for some of these people, it almost seems, I remember when I was in Catholic, and I, and I thought, Paul, there has to be a purgatory because there's got to be some, some sort of middle option at the very least. Well, yeah. And for me, it just, okay, when we die, how many people you know, even if they're good people, they're not perfect, but the scripture makes it really clear, you've got to be perfect, see them face to face. So does God wave the magic wand? Right. That's not the way he does it in this life. And so another, you know, but, but in his mercy, I was talking to someone in RCA who was from a tradition that taught that she do have to be perfect, you know, to be in heaven, but that if you're not perfect, when you die too bad. And she was just so ecstatic when she heard about the doctrine of purgatory, she says, it's wonderful. It's God's mercy because I was afraid that if I wasn't perfect, when I died up, it all was lost. But though, no, God keeps working on you. If you made that choice to die in friendship with him, he keeps working on you. So yeah. And yeah. And so there needs to be a, there needs to be a period of purgation in a sense for, for, for everyone. I mean, I can't imagine that I'm worthy of, of, of heaven of just walking right in. I mean, you know, I, I've certainly ran my time in purgatory. You know, we're not fit and we're not fit for heaven yet. That's, that's the thing to be in heaven. When you're perfected, you won't, even though your will will be more free than it's ever been, it will be perfected in such a way that you would never choose to disobey God's will. We're not, we're not there yet. We're CS Lewis, you know, a wonderful writer and his, the great divorce, basically that's about the purgatory process. It's a physics fiction, but in that he makes it clear that those who have not been through the process yet are so uncomfortable with trying to get to heaven because it demands change. And so only the ones who are willing, it's kind of, you know, allegory of what goes on now as well as there, only those who are willing to go through the painful changes possible are ever going to be even be fit to be there. Yeah. And so it's, it makes sense. Again, we're not earning it, but we're, we're becoming fit for it. Right. Right. Yeah. In a way, you can't earn it, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You need to be fixed. You need to be purged, right? You have to go to a place where it's kind of beyond your ability, right? To be cleansed and made worse, right? And you know, and when we get there too, we don't have our, won't have our bodies for a while while we're there until the resurrection. And I've often thought about this. So many of the weaknesses in human life sometimes have genetic and physical components that make it even harder, whether it's addictions, for instance, would be one example of predisposition, that kind of thing, that when we're, when we finally make it, we're willing to, you know, to the purgatory process, those things will be, those chains will be off of us. And we can finally get all that worked out by God's grace, cooperating with him without the body doing that. And then at the end with our resurrected body, never again a problem. So it's God's mercy. But I actually, I wrote another book, I'll just mention real quickly. Yeah. What's, what's called Last Words, Final Thoughts of Catholic Saints and Sinners. And it was just a collection of, with commentary of last words from mostly well-known Catholics, but some others. And same kind of thing you were talking about, that's, you know, I have a whole chapter there of people who in the end said no to God. And it's terrifying. It's, this is terrified. When Catholic Prelate, who while he's in his room dying, he has a vision of these horrible monkeys climbing all over the walls and coming for him that he knows are demons. And, and he's asked for a pen. He says, no, I can't. And that's it. It's a, or it won't or whatever. But, well, so we mentioned Faustina and related to this, this exact point. So this is on page 64 of the book. And so Faustina born in 1905, died in 1938. She was, she was 33 years old, this Polish nun, the, the apostle of mercy, right? Jesus told her, you will be my secretary of mercy to preach, to, to, to bring, to bring mercy to the coming generation. And, and so she dies in 1938, speaking of World War II, one year before the Nazis invaded Poland. In fact, one year almost to the month that, that the Nazis invaded September 1st, 1939, the Soviets invaded September 1739. Poland gets it from both sides. Hitler's style and back, World War II started. So you talk about a world that will need a notion of mercy, right? So, so she was given that vision and she died in 1938, but, but she's not canonized until the first Polish Pope, as some 62, well, decades later, she becomes in 2000, the first saint of the new millennium. So if you think about that, how, how profound that is, right? But this, anything we need a notion of mercy today is really, really going to need it. But talks here, and you have on page 64, today she said, I was led by an angel to the chasms of hell. It is a place of great torture, how awesomely large and extensive it is. They all say that, Paul, don't they? They all say it's a massive place, right? This man, by the way, so how many of them to talk about circles of hell, you see that a lot. And, and even a lot of, I don't know how Dante figured this out, right? But some of them even talk about what Dante would later call contrapasso, where you're, where you're punished kind of in direct relation to the type of vice that you're, or sin that you were responsible for in life. And that actually goes back to the ancient times, that the Apocalypse of Peter and Paul, those, and it's very clear that, you know, in all those, the punishments, that's the crime. It's a poetic justice of the crime. So Dante was, Dante was actually drawing on a whole genre that we'd call tours of hell, have been called tours of hell. Say more about that, if you could, but yeah. Yeah, I learned this when, some years ago, the only, the only novel, the only fiction I've written as, you know, book length was called Gehenna, then in second edition, it was given the name I really didn't like, that might visit to health. But I took the basic storyline and characters of Dante's Inferno, but then set it in 20th, and then updated to 21st century Atlanta, it starts, you know, because some people say Atlanta's, you know, right next door to hell, but I'm hard on it anyway. And then, and then the character was in certain ways like me, but others and same kind of thing. I did some inversions. So I realized when Dante wrote about hell, he made it this great dark, you know, wilderness. But I realized that in our day, the wilderness, everything's changed, the wilderness has no longer seen as the kind of scary place where the witches and the demons and the, you know, terrible critters are seen as the place of refuge and recreation. And the city is the place that seems great, the place of crime and, and noise and evil of all sorts. And so I may turn it into where it was a great city that was decaying with rings going down, circles going down rather than the farce. Anyway, and that book, one of the things I learned is that Dante was drawing on a number of, I mean, of course he did remarkably original things too, but was drawing on a number of earlier texts in the Christian tradition that have been dubbed tours of hell as a genre. Well, in which somebody on earth goes to hell and then comes back to talk about it. And that's why some of the present book we're talking about, Saints to Saw Hell, and I have that, that second line, you know, that subtitle and other Catholic witnesses, because not everybody in here, majority of them are Canada saints or in the process. But I added a few at the end, including Dante, who were just other Catholic witnesses to the dam. And it includes several of those figures then from earlier times, whose names we don't even know. But there were, I mean, we talked today about after death experiences, right? And people in modern times who saw heaven or who saw hell. So I mean, even way back when, I mean, those people were around. There were people then who had those experiences too and talked about them. What's really different about the saints is they don't actually die and then go see hell and come back. They're visionaries. They have visions, right? They see these things. But in those days, there were people, right, who had that experience and talked about it. And so these experiences were known about. This isn't just a 20th or 21st century thing. Oh, not by any means. And you also have cases of that where they come back, they're reporting to everyone. So they've been an equivalent of a coma or something. Anyway, near death experience, come back and then they'll say something like, and while I was there, I saw that such and such of the next village as he went to hell. And that's Dante, right? But he does the same thing. But I mean, just way back when and the earlier ones and then like medieval ones, and then they send a messenger to the next town and say, what about so and so? He said, oh, yeah, he died, you know, right at the time while the guy was having the vision at it. It's like a objective proof that the guy was really seeing something real. It wasn't just a dream. Right. Yeah. Yep. And the, so I'll get back to Faustina in a minute, but since we're on this point. So you have two chapters on the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul, right? And you right here, this is on page 109 of the Apocalypse of Peter. The Apocalypse of Peter, or also known as the Revelation of Peter, contains the earliest known Christian description of hell outside of the New Testament. So people think about that, right? Think about that statement. Dating from the middle of the second century, it claims to be an account of a vision that Christ granted to St. Peter of both heaven and hell. Now, you know, a lot of our Protestant friends will say, okay, but you're talking about something that's not legitimately recommended as part of the canon of the New Testament. Okay, all right, but just hold on. St. Clement of Alexandria, who lived roughly 150 to 215. Consider the book to be inspired scripture. The anonymous author of the famous Meritorian fragment, right, did as well, including it in what is now the oldest surviving list of New Testament books. However, the same author notes that not all the local churches of the day allowed it to be read in the public liturgy. Fifth century historian reports that in his day, it was read in the churches of Palestine each year on Good Friday. Now, the church, you know, still the church decides the canon of scripture, right? These are knocked down dragouts of church councils. In the end, though the apocalypse of Peter was popular among many early Christians, it was not included in the biblical canon of the universal church. At least two fragmented versions of the book have survived, one in Greek and a longer one in Ethiopia, right? And here, if you go through and read this, this is another one that is just frightening. It's really, it's really frightening. And so is the one that follows with the apocalypse of Paul. And I'm looking through my notes in here. I have like Virgil to Dante, sounds like Dante, ditto, inferno, right? And worms and blood. And also to there, there are some, there are some punishments in these two books for abortion, which really stood out at me. And also, I'm not going to be politically incorrect, politically incorrect and leave this out homosexuality as well. You know, that's, that's, that's, yeah, that's, that's in here as well. And again, this, this didn't, this didn't make the canon of the, of the final books of the New Testament, but it's, it's, it's striking, even Clement of Alexandria thought the, thought the, thought the Peter book should have been in. Yeah. And the reason I included that is, you know, I want to make it really clear, just to know what none of these are, except I guess I do have a section on biblical references to hell, but and none of these are we saying that they're on the same level of scripture, but they still have things to teach us. And like you said, to, to realize just like the dedicate, which is written actually before, apparently before some of the New Testament books were completed, does refer specifically to abortions, you know, as a heinous crime. That to see it in these early things as a testimony to the continuity of the church's teaching on some really important issues. And, you know, some people will say, well, why didn't Dante have a section of abortion? And that's a good question. But what you have to realize is that when they were writing, what was included were kind of the, the most common obvious public, publicly known and widespread sins of their day. Right. And then the, and the time with Dante, because of the Christian church's teaching, the Catholic church's teaching abortion surely would have happened, but it would, you know, it was not like it is today out in the open and public. And so he didn't, he didn't write about it. But these earlier folks, written when the Roman Empire was still, the pagan empire was still in place, abortion was a very common thing. And so you see it showing up in there where there's, you know, there's a reference to it. I was going to say by the same token, Dante includes stuff like, you know, the, the Greek folks that he has the folks who in his day, there were people if they were really wealthy, like in the Italian city states, they would have parties in which to, in a vain way to show their wealth to everybody, they would make big bonfires of money and furs and other kind of stuff just to show that they were so wealthy they could burn it. Wow. So those come up, you should, you see those in Dante's Inferno, but you don't see it now. You know, we do things, we waste our money in other ways, but it's all this to say, these are also good indicators of what were the burning issues at the time and that just because Dante didn't include something doesn't mean that from the beginning of the church, it hasn't done a serious grave matter in the church. But yeah, but it was not a time where abortion was commonplace, especially in Italy. I mean, Catherine of Siena, who's in this book was, I think the 24th or 25th child in her family, right? Her mother, her mother Lapa had had like 24, 25 children, right? So, you know, she wasn't, they weren't having abortions. Since I mentioned homosexuality, Dante has that in the Inferno. And I think it's an area of hell that's arid, right? I think it's to represent like infertility in a sense of not being productive, right? Not being able to reproduce. Roger talks about this in his book. Yeah. And also, you know, unnatural, interesting. And Dante, that occurs, what happens in the same circle, kind of with those who are in unnatural practices, includes usury, you know, interest because, you know, their point of view was the interest is this way of trying to put two pieces of money together and force it to produce more money when that's unnatural. It's not, you know, money doesn't multiply itself. And so they saw usury, you know, excessive interest or for some folks, any interest at all. There's that kind of thing. So that was one of the heart, was a part of there that, that, that it's a natural thing and that it's, that it's kind of an insult to God whose image the human person is when we reject the way he's done it. We reject his artwork and say, no, we can make it better. I mean, that's, that's part of what's going on there in Dante. And I'm watching the clock. I can't believe how fast the time is flying. But let me return to Faustina. And so she says on page is on pages 64 to 65 of your book, Saints Who Saw Hell, St. Faustina, the kinds of tortures that I saw, the first torture that constitutes hell is the loss of God. The second is perpetual remorse of conscience. The third is the ones condition will never change. I mean, right then and there, just try to think about that, right? This horrific condition that you are in at that moment in hell of all places will never change. The fourth is the fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it. A terrible suffering since it is purely spiritual fire, lit by God's anger. The fifth torture is continual darkness and a terrible suffocating smell. And despite the darkness, the devils and the sounds of the damned see each other and all the evil, both of others and their own. The sixth torture is the constant company of Satan. The seventh torture is horrible despair, hatred of God, vile words, curses and blasphemies. These are the tortures suffered by all the damn together. But that is not the end of the sufferings. There are special tortures designed for particular souls. And this is like Dante Contrapaso, right? Each soul undergoes terrible and indescribable suffering related to the manner in which it is sinned. And then she writes, let the sinner know that he will not be tortured. Let the sinner know that he will be tortured throughout all eternity and in those senses in which he made use of the sin. And she says that as the Fatima children did, when I came to after this vision, I could hardly recover from the fright, right? Their hearts, their minds had to be steeled by whoever ever took them there, or else they would have died of fright at the very sight of seeing the indescribable horrors that they saw. And it's, you know, I've written before about the fear of God, and that has understood so many times, misunderstood so many times. But so we have this kind of fear. And a lot of people, even with my novel set in hell, I had a pastor tell me one time, well, I would never let any of my people read that because it would just send them into despair. But even in that novel, really, the theme is grace. And with these, there's a reason why these people are allowed to see these things, to warn us, so that we won't end up there. That's the point. Not to just keep us terrified all the time. It's to give us hope in God's mercy and to say, I repent. No, I don't want that. I want you, Lord, to turn to him. And so nothing gives me more delight than when someone redo my novel set in hell or this book and says, Paul, after I read it, the first thing I did was run to the confessional. And I said, Praise God, that's the point. That's the point. Yeah. Well, and maybe this statement would do it from Catherine of Sienna. This is on page 55. And do you know why? Do you know why they cannot desire good? Because their life has ended and their free will is now bound. For this reason, they cannot attain merit. It's over, folks. It's over. You've had your chances. It's over. Because the season for doing so has passed. If they finish their life by dying in hatred with the guilt of mortal sin, their souls by divine justice remain forever bound with the bounds of hatred and forever obstinate in that evil. In this state, being gnawed by themselves, their pains always increase, especially the pains of those who have been the cause of damnation to others. So if that doesn't get you there, I don't know what does. And the fear of God, it's this good thing. The Old Testament says it's a clean thing. It's a purified thing. And Jesus, some people say, well, that's all the Old Testament, but Jesus said, don't fear men. Fear the one who can cast you into hell. So fear of God is a good thing. But it's a healthy fear because you're basically saying, you are God. You're holy. There are only two options to live with you forever, a little part from you forever. And if I want to live with you forever, this is the way I've got to live and to grow in your grace. And so to fear, that's part of what happened with me in my conversion experience. I had an encounter really with devil and with demons. And that sent me running the other direction right into the arms of God. But I didn't know what at the time that's what would happen. And that's what can happen this way with us too. So Catherine of Sienna alludes to that. This is on page 57. See, folks, this is why you got to buy this book. All right. The devil dearest daughter, this is God speaking to Catherine, is the instrument of my justice to torment the souls who have miserably offended me. Think about that. And I have appointed him in this life to tempt and harass my creatures, not so that my creatures will be conquered, but so that they may conquer proving their virtue and receive from me the glory of victory. No one should fear any battle or temptation of the devil that may come to him because I have made my creatures strong and have given them strength of will fortified in the blood of my son. Neither devil nor any other creature can move that free will because it is yours given by me. You can freely choose then to hold it or leave it as you please. It is an instrument and you place it in the hands of the devil right away. It becomes a knife with which he strikes you and slays you. But if you do not give this knife of your will into the hands of devil, of the devil, you will never be injured by the guilt of sin and any temptation. And then he said to her, God did, you see then the devil is my minister to torture the damned in hell and to exercise and prove virtue in the soul in this life. And so that's the point. You need to straighten up now, straighten out now. And he'll give us the grace. He gives us the grace and the scripture says no temptation is overcome us except what is common to man with the temptation. He'll give us the grace to overcome it, to stand strong. I guess if I make this political point, I wrote a piece for National Catholic Register last week about Nancy Pelosi saying, explained to Eric Rosales of EWTN News Nightly why she favored the subortion bill and she said, well, God has given us a free will. And this is not how you're supposed to use your free will. That's not what you're supposed to do with it. You're given the freedom to choose, but you're supposed to use it the right way, right? That's not the way that you're supposed to use it. In my mind, that's a kind of blasphemy to use God's name to justify that kind of behavior. That's, yeah, they'll have to answer, they'll be an answer for that. Right. Yeah. I mean, the Catechism, the Old Testament, the New Testament, right? Deuteronomy 30, 19, I lay before you a choice between good and between life and death. Choose life, right? Choose life. Thou shalt not kill. You're not to use your free will and improperly. Well, our time is flying. Let me wrap up by asking, so what's next? What are you working on next? And this was 2019. Did you have a book last year that I missed or anything that came out since that? Let me see what's come out since then. Children's Books and Children's Books. And they're picture books. John Fuller, who's a wonderful illustrator, their tan books, has cooperated with me on those. And there's another one of those coming out. I have one last year called Angels in the Air Arrayed, a Christmas ABC for kids. He did beautiful illustrations. This year, it's a Christmas accounting book. And then he also had one called Christmas Sweats during the air raid or what? No. Angels in the air arrayed. So that's a raid. So it's a Christmas AC. So it starts out with it takes every letter of the alphabet and then in rhyme and with alliteration, it talks about some figure or part of the Christmas story to tell the Christmas story. But it starts with A and goes through Z. And then the second one does the same thing, but it's a accounting book. So it starts out with one little boy and then twos Mary and Joseph and then on like that. So that's kind of fun. And there's some others that I've done with them. But I don't know if I should talk about the next one yet, because it's the kind of thing that a little piece of people want to say you're writing about that, depending how old they are. But I'll wait on that one. But the one I'm really excited about is that Tana in the past has published a book called The Life of Mary is Seen by the Mystics. And again, it's it's private revelations. And the book started with the big things that, you know, they got say saying, this is not gospel. They don't even agree among themselves all that. But what we've done is just woven a narrative of her life with scenes from the mystics as they saw. They've asked me to do the same thing for St. Joseph. So I'll be finishing that up, I hope by the end of December, and then I should come out next year. And that would probably have some and Catherine Embrick as well. Exactly. Yeah. And some others. Yeah, she probably she probably had more visions than anybody. Right. I mean, yeah, especially surrounding, you know, the life of Christ and our Lady. So there'll be plenty in there about St. Joseph. Very good. Very good. And listen, you've got to write those memoirs or at least write somewhere, or maybe in the preface of one of your books, tell that story that about the civil rights groups that pitted against one another, the two sides and and and the chilling story too, maybe about what you went through during that time with the occult, because it's I think that's what really moves people, right, for people to hear true stories. It's hard for them to relate to Hildegard and Bingham and the 11 hundreds, or to even somebody who's, you know, a canonized saint, a Faustina, the children of Fatima, two or three children of Fatima. But for Paul Thigpen, a guy who's alive and, you know, right now. It's a regular old guy. And Emory, I mean, they can came out of the 60s. A lot of people come relate to exactly what you're talking about, especially in this modern age where young people are just fleeing religion terribly. Well, my wife told me she doesn't think anybody would read it. No, she's wrong. She's wrong. Our wives always tell us that they humble us. Yeah, yeah, that's their job. That's their job. But you know, what I would just say, it wouldn't really be like a spiritual autobiography. That's why I call it memoirs. Mostly I just have a bunch of true stories, personal stories, some of the things I could tell you that just I still can't hardly believe they happened. That God has done for me. And I would I think it would encourage people to hear those stories and say that could happen to me too. Sure. You know, Scott Hahn is really good at writing a book on, like, say, Hail Holy Queen about the Rosary, about Mary, and then starting it off by talking about a terrible moment when his grandmother died and he went in and found her rosary and started ripping it all apart, right? And you read that and you're shocked. And but that, you know, that that gets your attention. He's very good, I think, at bringing in those kind of personal moments, insights, and then connecting it to the larger point in his book. And I think you do that as well, or, you know, or we'll continue to do more of it, I hope. Well, thank you. God, God grant me the time on this earth and the energy to do it in the sound mind. Amen. Amen. Well, thank you very much. So all right, folks, Paul Thigpen, saints who saw hell. You got to get this book. And Steve Cunningham, our fabulous producer, will post something up there on the screen right now if he hasn't already, I'm sure he has. And you got to check this out. It's really good. And for anybody that's living their lives sort of casually, as if there's no hell, get him, get him this book. This, this is, this is a wake up call. So Paul Thigpen, thank you very much. Oh, what a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. God bless you at all your viewers. Thank you very much. And everybody at Tan Books or join us, join us, check out our website and join us again for another edition of these, these discussions. We'll see you again soon. Take care. God bless.