The recent joint prayer between Leo XIV and King Charles III in the Sistine Chapel has unleashed a storm in the always turbulent religious climate of the United Kingdom. The trigger: a Northern Irish Presbyterian pastor, the Reverend Kyle Paisley, son of the renowned—and feared—Ian Paisley, founder of the Democratic Unionist Party, has openly called for the monarch to abdicate for having “violated his Protestant oath” by praying alongside the Pope.
The meeting, held on Thursday in Rome, brought together Charles III and Queen Camilla with Pope Leo XIV and Anglican Archbishop Stephen Cottrell. The gesture, described by the Vatican as “historic” and by the British press as “ecumenical,” has been received by some Protestant sectors with indignation worthy of Reformation pamphlets.
“Our king has denied the Gospel, has flown in the face of Holy Scripture, and has demonstrated that he is not at all what he claims to be: a true Protestant,” declared Reverend Paisley.
“The king has betrayed the Reformation”
According to Paisley, the joint prayer with the Pope was an act of “unacceptable spiritual compromise” and, moreover, a provocation with “cynical historical sense,” as it took place five hundred years after the printing of the New Testament in English by William Tyndale, that translator whom the papal Rome of the 16th century “still has not forgiven.”
“In his coronation, the king promised to be a true Protestant and to maintain the reformed religion established by law in England and Scotland,” Paisley recalled. And he added:
“Protestantism takes the Bible as the sole rule of faith and practice. Rome does not. Its authority is the Church, not the Word of God.”
The echo of a legendary surname
The surname Paisley is no small thing in Northern Ireland. The father of the current reverend, Ian Paisley, was one of the most combative—and controversial—men of the 20th century. Famous for his cry of “Antichrist!” against St. John Paul II in the European Parliament in 1988, he went so far as to accuse the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret of “fornication with the Antichrist” for having visited Pope John XXIII.
Kyle Paisley, more polite but no less firm, seems to continue the family legacy with fewer decibels and more irony. In a recent social media post, he lamented that “no evangelical MP” has denounced the “scandalous compromise of the king with Rome.”
The “tragedy” of ecumenism according to Belfast
Paisley’s criticisms found an echo in Wallace Thompson, spokesman for the Evangelical Protestant Society, who, without calling for the monarch’s abdication, agreed that “the doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants remain profound.” The Orange Order described the prayer as “a sad day for Protestantism.”