1995 Cirrus, Catalytic converter gets red hot

I just bought this non starting car do to no spark and replaced the distributor to get it running. It now starts and idles fine. I looked down towards the exhaust system and I saw the "cat" converted getting red hot. I shut it down, thank goodness it was night time when this happened, then I let it cool down. After 15 minutes, I started it back up, then 5 minutes later it started glowing again.
Would this just be a bad converter or is something else is going on. Thanks for any input. Neil