When Christians Get It Wrong on the Holocaust

By David W. Virtue, DD

www.virtueonline.org

April 22, 2025

Sometimes people on my side of the fence get it wrong, fearfully wrong, and there is no excuse for it. None. In times past one might have excused it based on political considerations or just plain ignorance; but not anymore.

There is no basis or room whatsoever for holocaust deniers. In many places in Poland and Germany the camps remain open, a somber reminder of man’s inhumanity to man. The stench of death is still there.

I visited Auschwitz in the late 60s as a young man in my 20s. I was with a small band of young Polish believers who had not seen the horror of the camp. Most of them never made it through the whole presentation. I was (and remain) deeply fascinated by evil; some might say I have a morbid interest in the subject, but I am reminded that there is a great battle going on in the universe between good and evil; God and Satan, and we must all choose sides.

For Christians, St. Paul reminds us that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Who would deny that we are experiencing such today!

Holocaust denying you might think belongs to the Hillbilly folk from rural Georgia – Deliverance territory – but that is not true.

A former Queen’s chaplain recently endorsed a holocaust denier Catholic priest as a “great scripture scholar whose books are well worth reading.” Pick me off the floor.

Dr. Gavin Ashenden, is a scholar of some repute himself. He holds a law degree, undergraduate and graduate degrees in theology and a Ph.D. with a dissertation on the life of Charles Williams. No small achievement.

But in a Catholic podcast, the ex-Chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, triggered fresh controversy after the celebrity convert to Catholicism signed a joint statement endorsing a notorious holocaust denier Catholic priest – Fr. James Mawdsley – who has loudly proclaimed the holocaust is “The biggest lie in history.” Mawdsley also claimed that the word “antisemitism” is “completely meaningless,” and denied that the Catholic Church “ever taught a hatred of people” before once again claiming that the Holocaust is a “lie.”  It didn’t happen, he says.

The statement, issued by the three co-hosts of the Catholic Unscripted podcast—Gavin Ashenden, Katherine Bennett, and Mark Lambert—praised 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 was suspended by the traditional Latin Mass society, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, in order to discuss the post-Vatican II changes in the Good Friday liturgy.

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.

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.”

In their statement, the Catholic Unscripted team went on to exonerate Bennett for not challenging Mawdsley on his antisemitic claims, “knowing him to be fiercely well researched and more knowledgeable (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. He was also briefly married, divorced and got an annulment.

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.

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."

That this “priest” should be given a pass by Ashenden is a tragedy of the highest order. Ashenden knows better. That Ashenden flipped to Rome is understandable bearing in mind the sorry state of the Church of England. But there are millions of global Anglicans who have not bowed the knee to Rome nor do they view people like Mawdsley as acceptable. Recently a populist Anglican priest, one Calvin Robinson, got tossed out of his Anglican jurisdiction, accused by his archbishop of antisemitism.

In short, antisemitism has no place in Christian life or teaching. Antisemitism must be exposed for what it is. Hateful words lead to escalation, to discrimination and dehumanization, culminating in genocide. Today the state of Israel faces charges of genocide.

We as Christians should repudiate this new antisemitism with every bone in our bodies. It is repeating the shameful errors of the German Christians who looked the other way in the 1930s when the Nazis made clear they intended to exterminate the Jews--just as Hamas and Iran intend.  For Christians to deny the Holocaust or not defend Jews and Israel when this pattern is being repeated, is unconscionable. 

If we do not speak up, then who will speak for us when our time comes?

END