Dr. John Sottosanti
Episode 332
9 JUNE 2025
He has been active in long distance endurance cycling — including twice completing the “Death Ride” — and has cycled in at least five different countries. He is a golfer as well. As a youth he participated in basketball, baseball, and football. He is the author of a book called, “Mortal Adhesions: A Surgeon Battles the Seven Deadly Sins to Find Faith, Happiness, and Inner Peace.” He is also active as a speaker, giving lectures at parishes about the Camino de Santiago and the Shroud of Turin. His story also includes having served three years as a captain in the Air Force Medical Service during the Vietnam War AND being a cancer survivor.
Notable guest quotes:
“My mother was a devout Catholic born in Connecticut, but my father was born actually in Sicily, and he came over when he was six, and he was very smart. He was able to get scholarships and go on to college and get a degree in civil engineering. But he always felt the anti-Catholic prejudice.”
“I got my religion mainly from the Baltimore Catechism, which was very boring. They basically taught you … who made you and who is God, and you had memorized answers, and it was quite boring, and it didn’t really impact me. And my dad showed no interest in the faith and research shows that if the father doesn’t, often the kids don’t.”
“I studied very hard, and I eventually got a doctorate degree and then trained in surgery, oral surgery, at the University of Southern California. I built a big practice, and I had a fair amount of fame. I had movie stars, Nobel Prize winners as patients.”
“I was sitting in my car … at night with basically the roof opened and looking up at the stars and I was suffering so much mentally that I cried out and said, ‘God, if you’re up there’ – but I didn’t know if He was or not, I didn’t know if there was a God – ‘all I want is inner peace’.”
“He led me along in the faith and eventually went on a Cursillo weekend when I was in my late 50s that brought me close to Christ and set me up for what was going to happen in the future.”
“I learned that Queen Isabella of Spain was infertile for seven years and went on the Camino and prayed at a specific tomb on that Camino of a saint. And she got pregnant and had a son and I said, ‘Well, Queen Isabella, if she could do it, I’ll do it’.”
“I honestly didn’t know that I was a good athlete. I found out on the Camino because I was cycling with 16 other people that I was the strongest, fastest, I had the agility to come down hills at high speeds. And so, I got involved with team and training at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and ended up doing incredible century rides in the mountains in which we would climb 16,000 vertical feet, do 130 miles in one day. And I turned out to be quite a cyclist.”
“I can remember the time exactly. It was 2008, it was April 15th, probably 1 o’clock in the afternoon, the doctor called and said, ‘I’ve got bad news for you. Biopsy report came back in. You do have prostate cancer. It’s very aggressive and it’s escaped the gland.’ And that was just a devastating blow.”
“I ended up going to a Mass for Padre Pio, praying to him and all of a sudden, after the Mass, I got this urge to go to Lourdes, France, and basically bathe in the healing waters of the Catholic shrine there in France.”
Related link:
John’s website (for his book, speaking, more)