Queen’s Former Chaplain Endorses Holocaust Denier Priest as ‘Great Scripture Scholar’

Gavin Ashenden’s damage control backfires as celebrity Catholic convert publishes conflicting messages.

A Catholic podcast, co-hosted by Dr Gavin Ashenden, the ex-Chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, has triggered fresh controversy after the celebrity convert to Catholicism signed a joint statement endorsing a notorious holocaust denier Catholic priest.

The statement, issued by the three co-hosts of the Catholic Unscripted podcast—Gavin Ashenden, Katherine Bennett, and Mark Lambert—praises the infamous pro-Nazi priest Fr. James Mawdsley as “a great scriptural scholar” whose “books are well worth reading.”

Catholics and Jews excoriated the podcast after Bennett platformed Mawdsley, a priest who is suspended by the traditional Latin Mass society, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, to discuss the post-Vatican II changes in the Good Friday liturgy.

“I think that the Jews have basically infiltrated the church, destroyed her liturgy, her dogma, her morals, and unless we call that out and overcome that and be honest about the governance in our Catholic faith then things are only going to get worse,” Mawdsley insisted in the podcast.

Catholic Unscripted released the prerecorded podcast on YouTube just before the Jewish Passover and Christian Holy Week. On the Wednesday of Holy Week, Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) flagged up the podcast’s Jew-hatred on X and Facebook.

The antisemitism campaign group reported that “several people from the Catholic community” had written to them “in disgust” regarding the priest’s well-publicized views on “the Jews” and the Holocaust.

“His views were not challenged on the podcast, which itself has also courted controversy,” CAA pointed out. “Thankfully, there are so many Catholics who cherish their community’s relationship with the Jewish community, including those who have written to us.”

Thousands of Catholics and Jews from across the world slammed Mawdsley and Bennett for the podcast. The CAA messages were reposted on social media by prominent personalities, including Damien Thompson, associate editor of The Spectator and host of the Holy Smoke podcast. “This is an outrage and a gift to the enemies of traditional Catholicism,” Thompson wrote.

After almost a week of being called out for their Jew-hatred, Ashenden, Bennett, and Lambert issued a statement falsely claiming that Mawdsley was a “great scriptural scholar and his books are well worth reading.”

“We have all met Fr Mawdsley, and read his books,” the trio maintained in their defense of the Jew-hating cleric. “He was also perfectly pleasant and kind when we met him.”

In their statement, the Catholic Unscripted team asserted that “the perfect storm of events meant that Katherine (who would ordinarily not be alone) was left at the last minute to conduct the interview on her own.”

However, social media posts reveal that Ashenden was receiving medical treatment and Lambert was away on a pre-planned trip to the Caribbean celebrating 30 years of his marriage.

The statement went on to exonerate Bennett for not challenging Mawdsley on his antisemitic claims, “knowing him to be fiercely well researched and more knowledgable (sic) than her.”

However, an investigation into Mawdsley’s profile and writings reveals that the priest has neither the training nor the credentials of a biblical scholar. After his A-levels at school, he went to Bristol University to study mathematics and physics, but dropped out after three terms.

He was ordained in 2016 after completing his priestly formation at the St. Peter’s Seminary in Wigratzbad, Germany. The seminary does not offer licentiate degrees in biblical scholarship — a canonical requirement in the Roman Catholic Church for a priest or layperson to be recognized as a scripture scholar.

The priest has never published a single article in a peer-reviewed journal or published through an academic press. All his seven books are self-published by his own company New Old. The company does not seem to have published books by any other author.

Mawdsley is also not part of any academic guild of Catholic biblical scholars, such as the Catholic Biblical Federation (international) or the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain.

The priest uses an obscurantist methodology, which is rejected by magisterial documents on the use of correct biblical interpretation, such as The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church presented by the Pontifical Biblical Commission to Pope John Paul II on April 23, 1993.

Further, Mawdsley’s misreading of the biblical texts to promote antisemitism is in direct violation of the exegetical and hermeneutical principles laid down in the Vatican’s The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible.

Indeed, the traditionalist priest’s misinterpretations are based on egregious textual, copyist, and translational errors in the Latin Vulgate, as in the case of his reading of Genesis 3:15 in his self-published book Crushing Satan’s Head: The Virgin Mary’s Victory Over the Antichrist Foretold in the Old Testament.

The erroneous Vulgate rendering of Genesis 3:15 reads: “she [Mary] shall crush your head” instead of “he [Jesus] shall crush your head” — an error finally corrected by the Vatican in the Nova Vulgata (1979) — which Mawdsley has refused to accept. The priest’s case for the entire book collapses when his use of the textual error is exposed.

In a prefatory note, Mawdsley also states that his “book follows the Vulgate and the DRB [Douay-Rheims Bible],” an English translation of the Vulgate that compounds the Latin version’s errors and is not accepted by biblical scholars. Mawdsley also scandalously refers to modern Bible translations as “judaised Bibles.”

While Mawdsley’s writings are completely ignored by Catholic biblical scholars (and most Catholic priests), traditionalist Catholic apologists such as Dr Robert Sungenis, president of Catholic Apologetics International, have attacked Mawdsley’s pretense to biblical scholarship.

In his book Why There Will Not Be a Mass Conversion of the Jews, Sungenis debunks Mawdsley’s book If You Believed Moses: The Conversion of the Jews Promised in the Old Testament, Vol. 1.

Sungenis elaborates:

All in all, when I read Fr. James’ book, If You Believed Moses, and compare it to what has been written about this subject in the past, I see the same mistakes being made; I see the same assumptions being made; I see the same lack of proper scriptural exegesis; I see the same distortion of ecclesiastical history; I see the same lack of critical judgment; and most of all I see the same exaggerated concern for the Jewish people as if the whole world turns on their future.

Mawdsley “asserts that the Latin mass teaches that the Jews will be converted in the future and that such teaching is not in the Novus Ordo mass, which apparently makes the Novus Ordo mass either inferior or illicit in Fr. James’ view.”

“We would first like to point out that the Latin Mass does not teach that the Jews will be converted in the future,” Sungenis notes, slamming Mawdsley for drawing “fantastic prophetic conclusions” from Old Testament historical narratives.

“Unfortunately, Fr. James never tells us how he arrived at his spiritual interpretation, that is, what principles of exegesis did he use to bring himself to such an out-of-context and speculative eschatological conclusion?” Sungenis laments.

“As for what qualifies Fr. James to tackle this somewhat difficult and esoteric subject concerning the future of the Jews, he does not speak of any except his training as a priest in seminary,” Sungenis warns.

In a Good Friday article for the Catholic Herald, Ashenden, who is associate editor at the prestigious Catholic newspaper and hosts the Merely Catholic podcast on its website, called Mawdsley “an influential and, in traditional circles, much admired and respected priest.”

Contradicting the signed statement with his colleagues, Ashenden did not refer to Mawdsley as a “biblical scholar,” but admitted that the priest had “risen to prominence both in self-published books and on YouTube and other internet platforms.”

While failing to condemn Mawdsley’s antisemitism, Ashenden euphemistically commented: “He is unambiguous in his focused claims about ‘the Jews.’”

The Catholic convert from Anglicanism cited articles by Dr. Joseph Shaw, chairman of the Latin Mass Society, which corrects Mawdsley’s flawed conclusions regarding the Jewish influence on the Vatican’s alteration on the Good Friday prayers.

A day after Bennett’s interview with Mawdsley, Ashenden posted his own video on Catholic Unscripted, explaining his perspective on antisemitism.

While not condemning or rebutting the podcast with Mawdsley, Ashenden admitted that “antisemitism” was “toxic,” but he, Bennett and Mark Lambert, the third member of the Catholic Unscripted team, “have different views on a lot of things.”

Jihad Watch first broke the story on Mawdsley’s providing primary sources for the priest’s claim that the Holocaust is “the biggest lie in history.”

“The Holocaust is a lie. It didn’t happen,” Mawdsley said on The Backlash. “Many Jews suffered as they were being expelled from Europe by the Nazis, but there was no genocidal plan from Hitler or the Germans to annihilate the Jews. That’s all a lie. And that’s what they wielded then as a weapon against the Church.”

In a podcast on the white nationalist Substack “White Rabbit,” Mawdsley has also claimed that “Adolf Hitler did not start World War II. It was the Jews.”

Stating that his goal is to “expose the demonic falsity of the Holocaust narrative,” Mawdsley elaborates:

Hitler did not set out to conquer Europe, while the Jews schemed then and now to rule the world. And crucially, the responsibility for the Jews who died in World War II, and that number is much closer to 1 million than to six million, is shared in very different ways by the Axis powers, the Allies and the Jews. I will offer evidence for all this not because I wish to promote National Socialism, but because I do wish to expose the Jewish lies which cause innumerable wars; lies still operative today to destroy nations and souls.

The Catholic Unscripted team has refused to delete the offensive video, despite several complaints.

“Since then we have faced vile attacks and false accusations. We are Christians. We take seriously the teachings of our faith, and have demonstrated that in all we say and do. Our work stands for all to see,” the statement noted.

Senior church authorities said that the bishops have no control over lay Catholics unless they are employed by the diocese.

Neither Ashenden (Shrewsbury diocese) nor Lambert (Brentwood diocese) serve in any official capacity.

In 2023, the Sisters of the Holy Cross reported that they had contributed 15,000 British pounds to the annual running costs of Catholic Unscripted.

Ari Mordechai is a human rights and antisemitic campaigner who lives in Tel Aviv. He is married to Ofek. Two of the couple’s five children have served in the Israeli Defense Forces.