Northern Ireland's First Minister the Rev Ian Paisley has accused Pope Benedict XVI of excommunicating all of Christendom.
"He celebrated the Twelfth of July by unchurching every church in Christendom with the exception of his own church," Dr Paisley said yesterday.
The DUP leader was speaking prior to his attendance at a gathering of Independent Orangemen for a Twelfth of July rally in Ballymoney, Co Antrim.
Dr Paisley was responding to a Vatican document published on Tuesday that restated Roman Catholic claims to being the one true church. The document described all Reformed or Protestant churches as not churches "in the proper sense", but as "ecclesial communities".
Dr Paisley said "this excommunication of all Christendom, by the pope, spells out the strongest possible message that the pope of Rome has not changed".
He continued: "All outside the pale of Rome are told dogmatically by him that they do not belong to the true church of Jesus Christ."
In the past Dr Paisley has described the pope (any pope) as the anti-Christ. He leads the Free Presbyterian Church, which opposes ecumenism.
Later, addressing members of the Independent Orange Order at Ballymoney, he said "the great buttress of the United Kingdom has been fractured by a turning away from the old paths of Reformation faith and the principles of the Gospel of Jesus Christ . . . we want to return to the truth of the Holy Scriptures for by the light of the Bible alone can this terrible darkness be dispelled," he said.
Meanwhile the Antrim-born Scottish Cardinal Keith O'Brien has accused Britain of "state-sponsored sectarianism" because of its laws excluding Catholics from the monarchy.
He also said "unequivocally" that institutionalised anti-Catholicism existed in Scotland and pointed to media attacks on Catholic education there as evidence.
In an article in the current edition of the Irish Catholic, he described the UK's Act of Settlement, under which a Catholic may not be monarch, as "a pernicious and anachronistic piece of legislation" that "has no place in a modern European state".
He said he was deeply disappointed that new prime minister Gordon Brown had not brought forward proposals to repeal that Act in his programme of reforms. He said he had written to Mr Brown last year on the matter.
