The Catholic Accent Podcast

16 - Blinded by The Light: The Radical Conversion of Saint Paul

• Diocese of Greensburg • Season 2 • Episode 6

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A man convinced he’s right meets a voice that can’t be ignored. We open with Saul standing at Stephen’s stoning—educated, zealous, and certain he’s defending God—and follow the thread to Damascus where light stops him cold and a single question changes the map of his life: “Why are you persecuting me?”

From there we trace the layers that make this story endure. Saul’s formation under Gamaliel, his Pharisee rigor, and his Roman status explain his force—and make his surrender even more striking. The word Lord on his lips isn’t casual; it carries the Old Testament weight of reverence, signaling that recognition begins before sight returns. Through Ananias’s hesitant obedience, “something like scales” fall, and a persecutor becomes a preacher. We explore why Acts tells this conversion three times, how Paul’s testimony fueled mission to Gentiles, and why the church remembers Peter and Paul as inseparable witnesses bound by the same gospel.

Along the way, we pull the story into the present. Most of us won’t meet a blinding light or fall off a horse, but we will be interrupted—by hard feedback, by loss, by friends who love us enough to challenge us. Conversion looks like letting community refine you, holding law and love together, and choosing habits that keep your heart listening. Rock bottom can be a foundation. Course corrections can be grace. And when the scales fall, even a little, the next right step becomes clear.

If this conversation helped you see Paul—and your own path—with fresh eyes, subscribe, share it with a friend who sharpens you, and leave a review so others can find the show. Then tell us: where do you need new sight today?

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Jordan Whiteko, Father Andrew Hamilton, Father Christopher Pujol, Vincent Reilly, Cliff Gorski, John Zylka, Sarah Hartner

SPEAKER_01:

You're listening to the Catholic Acting Podcast. We discussed the act that Jesus performed that stunned his disciples. Great to be back, Jordan.

SPEAKER_02:

You don't know us by now, you're never gonna know.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm Jordan Waco here with Father Hamilton and Father Poojal. Are you ready, Father Chris?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, to be blanded by the light, the light of the gospel. Jordan, what are we learning about today?

SPEAKER_01:

The conversion of St. Paul. St. Paul was introduced in the Acts of the Apostles as Saul, as witness to Stephen Stoning. So he was there, is what this is telling me. Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

So yeah, he was there. But remember, Saul becomes Paul. So the name's gonna change throughout as we move our way through the story, just as Simon became Peter. So just keep that in mind. So early on, we're gonna talk about Paul as Saul. Saul the the Greek the Pharisee.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So he was at Stephen's death, his the stoning.

SPEAKER_02:

Saul was at the stoning, yeah. It all comes back to those stones that were thrown. And he was a witness.

SPEAKER_00:

He was a witness.

SPEAKER_02:

So Stephen really has a huge impact, not only on those that are already Christian, by seeing his martyrdom, but even it begins kind of to turn the wheels of a man named Saul towards conversion, where he's now seen this great witness of Stephen dying for the Lord Jesus, who he claims his personal relationship with, about the glory of God. He sees the forgiveness that he even has for his persecutors, and he's standing there as others, the other Jewish uh people from the Sanhedrin are throwing stones at Stephen, killing him. He was just a witness, he didn't he saw the killing of Stephen. We don't believe that he threw a stone. He held the the garments of those that took them off so that they could have better aim, yeah, more velocity.

SPEAKER_00:

But you have to think, like, in in Saul's mind, right, he was a Roman citizen, he was born in Greece, so he's a pretty powerful guy. He has an upper level of of control in in civil society.

SPEAKER_02:

And he's well educated. Very Pharisee. So the Pharisees, as a group, followed very closely the Mosaic law to the Torah, the first five books of what we now term the Old Testament, but were especially hyper-focused on the Levitical laws and how they were to be lived out. And he studied under the famous rabbi Gameliel, who comes up in the Acts of the Apostles.

SPEAKER_00:

This the his studies and his education is what justified these people for the stoning by Levitical law.

SPEAKER_02:

Think about it this way: before Saul encounters Stephen, he just hears about this sect of individuals that believe that their leader, who claimed to be the Messiah, resurrected from the dead, that they are the way, that they are following a certain way that is different from the Mosaic law, from the Levitical law, of everything that he's known and studied as a Pharisee. He is very skeptical and even thinks that this is a schismatic group that's drawing people away from righteousness of God and holiness. Even a group that blasphemes. It blasphemes something false. And so what we see with Saul is that he's reticent and even angry at that, because he's trying to protect what he believes to be the truth of the Mosaic law found in his Pharisaic from this denigration of this new Christian group that followed this one called Jesus of Nazareth, who rose from the dead, that they're claiming. And so that's why he's there, more or less persecuting this group, not wanting their message to spread or to grow, because he sees them as being false, the Christians.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. And so after this stoning of Stephen, Saul continues to persecute the Christians. He continues to be present at their at their martyrdoms, continues to round them up and turn them over to the Jewish authorities.

SPEAKER_02:

And so Saul He's like a policeman for the Mosaic Law. Yeah. He sees the Christians as theological criminals.

SPEAKER_00:

They're the problem that needs rounded up and dealt with. And so that was what Saul was really aiming to do.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. So, but then he experienced a profound conversion that changed that traject trajectory, right? Uh what was what happen what happened?

SPEAKER_00:

So let's talk about what it wasn't first. I mean, there's beautiful depictions of the conversion of Saint Paul, and most famously Caravaggio's Saul is falling off of the horse, and the horse is up in the air, and this bright light appears, and and Jesus says, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? Now we have no evidence that he was actually riding a horse, but I think it's a great way to show the mystery of what's happening here.

SPEAKER_02:

You fall off your high horse is like a statement, you know, that kind of you're knocked down from your pride. So it makes sense why it's imaged that way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. So Saul is moving along, and this bright light overtakes him so much that he becomes blinded, he cannot see, and he hears the voice that says, Why are you persecuting me? It's not persecuting others, it's not persecuting Stephen, it's not persecuting this specific group. But what Jesus is saying to him is that you're persecuting me because you're persecuting others, and they act in my name, and you are now attacking me.

SPEAKER_02:

And Saul even asks a question back after this great light in that voice who are you, Lord? Or referring to this, that which has been shown to him as being God, right? That word Lord has a lot of weight behind it in the Old Testament into the new. And that's how Jesus is first known by the earliest Christians and preached, especially by Paul later in all of his letters, as Jesus as Lord and Savior.

SPEAKER_01:

Jesus Christ is this when he becomes Paul, when he when he hears this a voice that says, Why are you persecuting me? This is his conversion. So this is right when he's the making of Paul. This is the making of Paul. So Paul. So he just changes the letter and now he's a new man.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, we think about it like as when he received baptism, right? You receive a Christian name. So Paul is his Christian name. Okay. But other than that.

SPEAKER_01:

But it's not Saul Paul. Like, you know, when we get our confirmation name, we pick a whole new name, but that doesn't change our first name.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, no.

SPEAKER_01:

It's so he's just he he saw becomes Paul.

SPEAKER_02:

Any name change in sacred scripture as a means to say that this person is changed and now they're oriented in a different way. Even beautifully within monastic and religious life, you'll still see in the tradition of the church that monks often, religious sisters, take different names from their secular name. They might have gone in. The Pope. Yeah, the Popeyes. That's actually a great analogy there. Good.

SPEAKER_00:

And what's interesting too is what Father was mentioning about Saul's response of who are you, Lord, being Greek and being so highly educated, you know, in the Old Testament, they never spoke the name of God. That the name of God, the tetragrammaton, was so holy, it's not written, it's not spoken, and it would be replaced with the word Adonai or Kurios, which means Lord. And so for him to respond, Lord, is saying that he's already drawing a connection to the old law.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a sign of faith. Okay. Paul's conversion is told three times in the Acts of the Apostles. Why is this such an important event that it gets told three times?

SPEAKER_02:

How many times would you tell your vocation story? So we're asked to tell our vocation story like constantly as priests. Like, why have you decided to follow this call of the Lord? And so for Paul, I mean, he's writing that down because it has such a significance. When we think about Saint Paul, who he becomes after this incident on the road to Damascus, it propels him into preaching the message to Jew and Gentile, but especially to the Gentiles, traveling all around the region to different places and planting church communities there.

SPEAKER_00:

Until he ends up back in Rome with St. Peter.

SPEAKER_02:

And so how important his story was. It's like that he was one of the most famous uh spreaders of the gospel. And so everybody needed to know his story. And so I'm sure that he constantly gave that, again, reaching back to some of our words from previous times, right? From charygma, the way in which God had converted him, literally turned the tables on him, and now he's a different person. But what we didn't get to there in his conversion that we should mention so we don't forget is that he was blinded, right, by this light. And does he remain blinded? For a time until he comes to one of the set-aside disciples, Ananias, who is to pray over him. And then it says that from his eyes fell like scales, and he was able to see again.

SPEAKER_00:

Um a reality, but also a good typology and a symbol as well, that that this old way that he couldn't see through, that that that harsh reality of the old law that it was so oppressive upon God's people, is now removed to see this new law of love. So instead of him going to persecute Christians out of disgust and a belief that they were against God, he now is able to interact as a Christian, seeing the completion of the old law. And just to go back for a moment on the threefold um telling of this story of conversion in the Acts of the Apostles, you know, Peter is never without Paul in terms of how we look at the church. And Paul was never without Peter. They're the the great like twins, they call them. And if we think about what happened when Peter was reconciled post-resurrection to Christ, he denied him three times, and then there was a threefold um profession of faith that Peter made. And so now we have Saint Paul making a threefold act of faith in the Acts of the Apostles, so that those early Christians realized even though he was a Gentile, he shares in the same faith that at one point was reserved for the Jewish people.

SPEAKER_01:

Not all of us are going to have such a profound conversion experience like St. Paul. But how do we experience conversion in our lives today?

SPEAKER_02:

Sometimes it's by a challenge of another individual where maybe we're going down the wrong path, right? So the early Christians were called the way. That's what it actually says in the Acts of the Apostles here for especially the first account of St. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. But we have to be challenged to say maybe we're going down the wrong path and to correct course a little bit. And that's part of the Christian community. And that's our continual conversion and why we call each other to a higher level. You should be around people that call you to the heights of holiness, but they don't let you dwell where you are or meet you there, but rather raise you up in charity and working together to be holier people. We're really formed by the people around us. If we're around people all the time that we were, it was just easy to get along with, you know, that doesn't really form a lot of habit of endurance or holiness. But even those people in our lives that get on our nerves a little bit.

SPEAKER_00:

They make us that's why you come here. Yeah, that's why that's why we do this podcast.

SPEAKER_02:

But that helps us to continue to be formed and to be challenged towards holiness and conversion.

SPEAKER_00:

Conversion doesn't always have to be a star-struck moment of blindness, but it could be a tragedy that then touches your heart and makes you realize that everything you have is fleeting. And the better and the faster we can turn and make ourselves more like Christ, the better we will be for it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and that's uh rock bottom can be a firm foundation for the rest of your life. And so sometimes you don't know how far you've fallen until you hit the ground, and then you know where you need to go. And that's true of St. Paul from From the ground up? Yep. And it continues to spread the gospel.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for listening to the Catholic Accent podcast. Don't forget to follow, like, and subscribe to our show. He then became a great persecutor of the Christians. Uh, who was Saul? Well, he wasn't a great persecution. Hold on. You have that as the first thing.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, I know, but get him to tell you the story of that Paul was standing there and all the cloaks were laid at Paul's or at Saul's feet.

SPEAKER_01:

So I'm gonna start over.

SPEAKER_02:

You just really like stoning. We always come back to stoning.