About Gerry Matatics
Gerry speaks at University of Notre Dame; Gerry & wife Leslie, parents of ten (June 2005)
Gerry Matatics is well-known throughout the English-speaking world as
an able and entertaining apologist for the traditional Catholic Faith.
Formerly an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and a
vigorous opponent of Catholicism, Gerry spent three years during his Ph.D.
studies at Westminster Theological Seminary researching the Catholic Faith to
save his former seminary classmate Scott Hahn from converting. Finally convinced
by his studies that Catholicism is the original & only legitimate form of
the Christian Faith, Gerry and his family abjured the heresies of Protestantism
and embraced the Catholic Faith in Easter of 1986.
The first PCA minister ever to become Roman Catholic, Gerry is the only one of the dozens of Protestant-minister “converts” of the last twenty-five years to end up fully embracing the traditional Catholic Faith, abstaining (as did the Catholic recusants during the English Reformation) not only from the “New Mass” but also from those pseudo-Tridentine Masses offered by invalidly or illicitly ordained Catholic priests, or offered according to the unauthorized 1962 Missal of antipope John XXIII and in union with antipope Benedict XVI, such as the Masses offered by the FSSP, the SSPX, and similar clergy.
Gerry uncompromisingly rejects as constituting a counterfeit Catholicism all the doctrinal, liturgical, and moral novelties previously condemned by the Church but now emanating from Rome since 1958, such as ecumenism, religious liberty, the survival and salvific sufficiency of the Old Covenant in our day, interfaith worship, altar girls, etc. He rejects as heretics and therefore false “popes” those who have sought to foist these manifestly unorthodox abominations upon Catholics — namely John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I & II, and now Benedict XVI.
But Gerry equally rejects the antinomian anarchy and sectarian spirit that characterizes so much of the "traditionalist resistance” to Vatican II in our day (including the proliferation of numberless unauthorized “independent” priests, bishops, and religious), an anarchy not unlike that found in the similar days of the Judges: “In those days there was not a King in Israel; but every one did that which seemed right to himself” (Judges 17:6; 21:24).
As Founder & President of Biblical Foundations International, Gerry is the most-traveled Catholic apologist of our time, speaking around the world on radio and TV, and in churches, colleges & universities (including Oxford University, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, University of Notre Dame, Boston College, Furman, Sydney University), and seminaries. He has lectured throughout the US as well as in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, France, Monaco, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
Mr. Matatics graduated with distinction as a scholarship student from the prestigious preparatory school Phillips Exeter Academy. At the University of New Hampshire he designed a major in Classical, New Testament, and Patristic Greek and, taking double the normal course load, earned his B.A. in two years instead of four (the only undergraduate ever to do so), graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. He received a Master of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, at the time he entered the Church was ABD (all but dissertation) for a Ph.D. in Biblical Interpretation from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, the top-ranked conservative Presbyterian seminary in the world, and has taken graduate courses in Sacred Scripture at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Gerry has served as professor of Theology, Sacred Scripture, Patristics, Apologetics, Latin, and Greek at Christendom College, Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology, St. Joseph University, University of San Diego, Aquinas College, and Our Lady of Guadalupe International Seminary.
Gerry and his wife Leslie homeschool their nine children, ages (in 2009) 25 to 5.