Catholic Podcast Co-Hosted by Queen’s Ex-Chaplain Platforms Holocaust Denier Priest

By Ari Mordechai

THE STREAM

April 14, 2025

A high-profile Catholic podcast co-hosted by celebrity Catholic convert Dr. Gavin Ashenden is stirring controversy after Ashenden’s colleague, Katherine Bennett, platformed a disgraced holocaust denier Catholic priest.

Fr. James Mawdsley, who has called the Holocaust “the biggest lie in history,” claimed that the genocide of the Jews “didn’t happen” on the Catholic Unscripted podcast, posted on YouTube, days before the Jewish Passover and Christian Holy Week.

“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 claimed.

Bennett, a Catholic journalist and former stand-up comedian, who was appointed mentor for evangelization in the archdiocese of Southwark by Archbishop John Wilson, did not challenge Mawdsley but responded by revealing that she too was now a member of a Latin Mass parish.

“The Jews and the devil are laughing at us,” stressed Mawdsley. The traditionalist priest who featured on the white nationalist show The Backlash claimed that Catholics who have a “backward idea of obedience” have “been manipulated” to shout “crucify him” in the post-Vatican II passion liturgy on Palm Sunday and Good Friday.

“It was a Jewish organization Amici Israel instigated by a Jewish woman and two poor priests who lost their way” who urged the Vatican to insert a genuflection during the Good Friday prayer for the Jews, Mawdsley told Bennett.

The “Satanist” Jews, who went to Pope Pius XII in 1949, told the pope that inserting the genuflection during the said prayer was “more important than removing [the word] ‘perfidious’ in the prayer for the Jews,” the priest claimed, without citing any sources.

While Pope Pius XII rejected their requests, the Jewish historian, Jules Isaac, who met Pope Pius XII and Pope John XXIII, was largely responsible for influencing the Vatican to alter the prayers, Mawdsley, who was suspended by the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, insisted.

The priest, who is known to spout similar conspiracy theories regarding the Jewish subversion of Catholic liturgy, further claimed that Jewish organizations like B’nai B’rith, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the World Jewish Congress run by Nahum Goldmann were also “working in the background.”

According to Mawdsley, Goldmann had a “Talmudic element” whose goal was to “destroy everything” of the old order of society, including a social hierarchy, so “no tradition will be considered sacred anymore.”

The Jews “were blaming the Church straight after World War I for Auschwitz,” Mawdsley falsely asserted, even though Auschwitz a concentration camps and extermination center run by the Nazis in occupied Poland only during World War II.

“I won’t say too much on your channel on YouTube but that’s the biggest lie in history,” he continued. “And to make the church feel a responsibility that wasn’t hers: that the genocide of Jews occurred because of the gospels and because of the church fathers, this is the most phenomenal blasphemy.”

“But the World War II lies are the biggest and the first lie of the devil against God,” the priest, who is notorious for his revisionist version of history, maintained, blaming “the Jews” for “going in to tell in (sic) the Vatican after filling the press with these stories that the church is responsible for the genocide of Jews which didn’t happen.”

“And neither is the Church responsible. She’s done the opposite. She’s protected them for 2,000 years,” Mawdsley claimed, despite the Vatican. “And yet they accuse her of seeking their death. And the Church bows to this lie with her liturgy.”

“The Holocaust is a lie. It didn’t happen,” Mawdsley earlier claimed 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 while 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.

Meanwhile, 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 rebuting 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.”

“And one of the great things about the way in which we work together is that we allow each other to express opinions. Some of which we passionately agree with and others which we don’t agree with,” he noted.

“Sometimes you have to say that’s a line I can’t cross. And for me antisemitism has thrown up the issue of those lines,” he added.

“And how we manage the Jewish question seems to have become a litmus test for whether or not people can get on whether they can talk together. Well I’m absolutely convinced that one of the things we need to do is to give each other space for exploring different views,” he said.

“As my father once taught me it is not enough for people especially public figures to be neutral or not be antisemitic, one must be anti-antisemitic,” he said.

In his discussion, Ashenden offered six different definitions of “who is a Jew,” giving “credit to Father Mawdsley.” The former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, said he “like[d] very much his [Mawdsley’s] work on the older and the younger son” [cf. parable of the Prodigal Son].”

Ashenden, who converted to Catholicism, acknowledged he found Holocaust denial “utterly and completely distasteful,” but said he had changed his mind on some aspects of the Shoah.

Ashenden explained:

Now forced to look at it more carefully, I’ve discovered that some of the facts may be contested particularly the numbers of Jews killed in the death camps. I have to say I don’t really care about the numbers. They’re placed at six million. There is a school of thought that says the numbers have been inflated and they’ve been inflated by Jewish people in order to gain a greater sympathy. I don’t know if that’s true literally but I don’t buy it as a comment.

The high-profile convert to Catholicism curiously stated that numbers did not matter in the case of the genocide of the Jews:

You see I don’t think it matters whether six million Jews were gassed, killed, tortured, starved to death, or five! I don’t care if it wasn’t five and it was four. I don’t care if it wasn’t four and it was three. You can reduce that number right the way down. It makes no difference to me whatsoever in terms of the responsibility the Western civilization and particularly the Nazi party in Germany take for what happened.

Thousands have watched both videos and the majority of comments from traditionalist Catholics have been in praise of Mawdsley. While a handful of comments have praised Ashenden, most commenters attacked him for capitulating to the Jews.

It is not clear if Ashenden will seek to preserve his reputation by quitting the Catholic Unscripted team or will continue to associate with Bennett, who throughout the interview was affirming of Mawdsley’s views and never challenged him once. Lambert has not issued any disclaimer or dissociated himself from the podcast.

While Mawdsley has written seven books in which he repeatedly discusses “the Jews,” all his books are all self-published by his own company New Old. The company does not seem to have published books by any other author.

Mawdsley was married to Elizabeth in January 2005. On their honeymoon in Rome, the couple received a blessing from Pope John Paul II. The marriage later broke down and Mawdsley subsequently obtained a declaration of nullity.

In a landmark gesture in March 2000, Pope John Paul II visited Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust museum in Israel, and apologized for centuries of Catholic antisemitism.

“I assure the Jewish people the Catholic Church … is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place,” he said, adding that there were “no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust.”

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