(LifeSiteNews) — Catholic theologian and author Dr. Paul Thigpen died on February 24 at the age of 71.
“Catholic convert, author and theologian Dr. Paul Thigpen died yesterday,” LifeSiteNews co-founder and Editor-in-Chief John-Henry Westen wrote on February 25 on X. “Let’s pray for the repose of the soul of this great soldier for Christ. He contemplated St. Joseph’s death, and I wonder if his wasn’t similar.”
Catholic convert, author and theologian Dr. Paul Thigpen died yesterday.
Let’s pray for the repose of the soul of this great soldier for Christ.
He contemplated St. Joseph’s death and I wonder if his wasn’t similar. WATCH … @TANBooks pic.twitter.com/AyEO8w5An4— John-Henry Westen (@JhWesten) February 25, 2026
Thigpen, a prolific and well-respected Catholic author, was born on May 18, 1954, in Savannah, Georgia. He was raised Presbyterian and briefly became an atheist before returning to Christianity. He received a doctorate in historical theology from Emory University and would become a Protestant pastor before converting to the Catholic faith in 1993. In 2016, he said that he encountered “powerful, malicious non-human intelligences that didn’t fit into my world view, but reminded me of certain Gospel accounts I had learned about as a child.”
This led him to turn to Sacred Scripture and, eventually, back to faith in God. “In a sense, you could say that I came to believe in the devil before I came to believe in God,” he said. This realization “sent [him] running back into the arms of Our Lord.”
In 2023, Westen interviewed Thigpen about his book on St. Joseph: The Life of Saint Joseph as Seen by the Mystics. The book weaves together a life of St. Joseph based on private revelations from mystics, including canonized saints like St. Bridget of Sweden and Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich.
READ: These mystical revelations give us a look inside the hidden life of St. Joseph
“The Church tells us we don’t take these things as gospel. We don’t take them even as history,” the Catholic author told Westen at the time. “But what you can do is take them the way you would take the scenes in Mel Gibson’s [The Passion of the Christ] – as a very powerful, sacred drama that brings us more deeply into the Gospel stories.”
Thigpen also authored books on various other subjects, including Manual for Spiritual Warfare, A Year With the Saints, Saints Who Saw Hell, The Biblical Names of Jesus, and several children’s books. He also studied the issue of aliens from a Catholic perspective and wrote the book, Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith: Are We Alone in the Universe with God and the Angels?
