King should abdicate if he prays with the Pope, says Kyle Paisley

King Charles III should abdicate if he proceeds with plans to pray alongside Pope Leo XIV in Rome, according to the son of Democratic Unionist Party founder Ian Paisley.

Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster’s TalkBack programme, Mr Kyle Paisley said the King would not be “true to his oath” to uphold the Protestant faith if he joined the Pope in prayer at the Vatican.

“The King should uphold the Protestant faith,” he said. “By praying with the Pope he is breaking his oath and not upholding his promise to defend a reformed faith when he mixes in that kind of way.” Asked if the monarch should abdicate should he go ahead, he replied, “Yes, because I don’t think he is being true to his oath.”

Mr Paisley warned that “the Protestant faith historically and theologically is a world apart from Catholicism” and added, “I don’t for the life of me see how he can engage in that kind of corporate worship. It gives the impression that it’s not essentially different.”

On Facebook, Mr Paisley wrote that the meeting represented “perhaps the most significant event in the religious world” and questioned whether its timing, five centuries after William Tyndale’s first English New Testament, was “mere coincidence or cynical timing.” He accused the Royal House of departing from “their professed Protestantism”, saying, “By an act of corporate worship with the head of a church which still describes England as ‘Mary’s dowry’ … our King has denied the Christian Gospel, flown in the face of Holy Scripture, given the lie to his oath and shown that he is not at all what he says he is – a true Protestant.”

The service is intended to demonstrate harmony between the two denominations. The Sistine Chapel Choir will sing alongside the Choir of St George’s Chapel and the Choir of His Majesty’s Chapel Royal, reflecting the King’s long-standing interest in environmental and inter-faith issues.

Kyle Paisley’s intervention recalls the stance of his late father, the firebrand Free Presbyterian founder and DUP leader Ian Paisley, who denounced Pope John XXIII in 1963 and famously disrupted Pope John Paul II’s address to the European Parliament in 1988, shouting, “I denounce you, antichrist.”

The King’s forthcoming encounter with Pope Leo XIV will be his first with the new pontiff and is viewed by some as a milestone in reconciliation and by others as a test of the Crown’s historic Protestant identity.

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