Pope visit a 'mistake' – Paisley
THE pope should not be invited to the UK, former first minister Ian Paisley has said.
Mr Paisley, who as Lord Bannside will take his seat in the Lords on Monday, claimed that the government was attempting to distance itself from the visit and suggested there was significance behind the fact that the Queen would meet the Roman Catholic leader "on Scottish soil".
In an interview with the BBC World Service, Mr Paisley, who led opposition to Pope John Paul II crossing into Northern Ireland when he visited Dublin in 1979, said the papal visit in the autumn should not happen.
Asked about the visit, Mr Paisley said: "Well, I think it's a mistake. I think he should not be invited to the country.
"But I don't know how it has been done because they have had it all secret. Nobody knows who made the thing. You go and ask a question of any minister and he says he doesn't want to have anything to do with it.
"The Queen is only meeting them on Scottish soil, not on English soil."
The founder of the Free Presbyterian Church defended his 1968 comment about Catholics that "they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin", saying: "I don't think that it's wrong to say that the Roman Catholic Church did believe that they should have very large families."
Mr Paisley also stood by his 1988 European parliament denunciation of the pope as "the anti-Christ".
He said: "Well, it's quite true. He does seek by his claims to replace Christ. And he puts himself in the place of Christ."
Mr Paisley also attacked the Roman Catholic Church's "very weak stand" in stopping child sex abuse in the church and punishing abusers.
"A person, like some of the priests we've had, destroying the lives of young people and then going out and saying, 'I can forgive sins' – it's only right that be called what it is.
"That is anti-Christ in teaching and in doctrine.
"I believe that any man that destroys a child's life, as we have seen scores of young people in this day and generation – and then the church having to wait until it's uncovered – is an absolute disgrace."
Mr Paisley famously struck up a rapport with Martin McGuinness when they shared office in Stormont Castle. But, asked whether he thought the Sinn Fein man would become first minister next year under the St Andrews changes to the Belfast Agreement, Mr Paisley said: "I don't think he's going to be leader."
Speaking of the recently-published Saville report into Bloody Sunday, Mr Paisley said: "The people that died were shot wrongfully, were innocent people and I don't think you will find any Protestant trying to defend that."
See Ian Paisley's column, page 21
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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