Show drops guest who made Christ claims

THE Irish American writer who claims to be the knock-on result of a roll in the hay between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene has been dropped from tonight’s Late Late Show because the topic is too hot for Irish audiences.

Kathleen McGowan, the 40-something novelist and self-proclaimed descendant of a union between Jesus and Mary Magdalene claims to be the walking, talking, living proof of the “sacred bloodline” made famous in his mega-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.

Among her believers are the editors at New York publisher Simon & Schuster, who have thrown their weight behind her recently published autobiographical religious thriller The Expected One, which had a first print run of 250,000 copies.

Among her detractors are Pat Kenny and his team.

Yesterday, in an interview on Irish radio she declared that she had been “uninvited by Pat Kenny and his crowd.”

She went on to say that she had been dropped from the first Late Late Show of the new season because, “the topic is too hot for the Irish people, which I think is rubbish and I think is absolutely patronising, and I think the Irish people are perfectly capable of reading books and making up their minds themselves.”

Mrs McGowan, whose mother is from Sligo and who studied journalism in Belfast, made headlines all over the world last month with the claim “that Jesus Christ was her grandfather……many greats removed.”

She also made $2 million dollars in a book deal with Simon and Schuster.

When asked if she was nothing but a chancer, she replied in an interview on The Last Word on Today FM: “No, absolutely not and I’ll tell you something else: the only people who would ask that question are people who have not read the book…I’m not chancing anything. What I did chance was my family and my security and my house; we went through bankruptcy, we sold everything we owned over the years so that we could afford to continue to do the research for this book…the more I researched this the more I became convinced that no matter what happened I had to keep going until I got to the truth of this story.”

McGowan’s novel, like The Da Vinci Code, is replete with conspiracies, hidden documents and a Vatican hierarchy that keeps close watch on individuals searching for secrets hidden for 2,000 years.

But that’s where the similarities end. The Expected One is the story of Maureen Paschal, a woman who begins to have visions of Mary Magdalene, discovers she is a descendant of Mary and Jesus and undergoes a dramatic search for a gospel written by Mary that is hidden in southwestern France. In a parallel plot, McGowan tells what she says is the actual story of the marriage and children of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.