Fr James Mawdsley

Born in 1973, James Mawdsley grew up in Lancashire, England. During 17 months of solitary confinement as a prisoner of conscience in Burma (in 1998 and 1999-2000), he received the Bible which helped turn his cell from “hell to heaven”, beginning a passion for studying Scripture. From 2003 to 2004 he served as Secretariat to the British-North Korean All-Party Parliamentary Group, sitting in on high-level political-military meetings in Pyongyang and London. Having met former prisoners and guards who had defected, Mawdsley’s priority in arranging these exchanges was to challenge the North Korean government for their gulag system. Slowly realising the futility of political attempts to overcome evil unless Jesus Christ is honoured as King of Kings, Mawdsley was surprised on 3rd September 2005 by a crystal-clear call to the priesthood. Fr Mawdsley was ordained a Catholic priest in 2016, celebrating the traditional Roman rite only. His New Old book series, a discovery of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament read in the light of the New, is offered both for spiritual nourishment and to address the problem of evil: personal (our own sin), global (look around!) and cosmic (satan). Christus vincit!