Tim Staples is Director of Apologetics and Evangelization at
Catholic Answers, but he was not always Catholic. Tim was raised
a Southern Baptist. Although he fell away from the faith of his
childhood, Tim came back to faith in Christ during his late teen
years through the witness of Christian televangelists. Soon after,
Tim joined the Marine Corps.
During his four-year tour, he became involved in ministry with various
Assemblies of God communities. Immediately after his tour of duty,
Tim enrolled in Jimmy Swaggart Bible College and became a youth minister
in an Assembly of God community. During his final year in the Marines,
however, Tim met a Marine who really knew his faith and challenged Tim
to study Catholicism from Catholic and historical sources. That encounter
sparked a two-year search for the truth. Tim was determined to prove Catholicism wrong,
but he ended up studying his way to the last place he thought he would
ever end up: the Catholic Church!
He converted to Catholicism in 1988 and spent the following six years in
formation for the priesthood, earning a degree in philosophy from St. Charles
Borromeo Seminary in Overbrook, Pennsylvania. He then studied theology on a
graduate level at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, for two years.
Realizing that his calling was not to the priesthood, Tim left the seminary in 1994
and has been working in Catholic apologetics and evangelization ever since.
Tim Staples