U.S. Cardinal Burke Cuts Bannon Ties over Gay Sex Film

U.S. cardinal Raymond Leo Burke -- a conservative heavyweight and the pope's fiercest critic -- has distanced himself from former Trump adviser Steve Bannon over a proposed film about homosexuality in the Vatican.

Burke, seen by some as a key ally of Bannon's in his attempts to foment right-wing populism in Europe, took umbrage at the former journalist's interest in making a film based on the book "In the Closet of the Vatican".

"I disagree completely with a number of Mr. Bannon's statements regarding the doctrine and discipline of the Roman Catholic Church," Burke said in a statement on Twitter, carried by the I.Media religious news agency on Wednesday.

The book was released this year and claims that four in five Vatican clerics are gay, including cardinals who use male prostitutes.

Bannon has met with the book's French author Frederic Martel with a view to turning it into a film, according to faith news website LifeSite, which unwittingly implied the pair had Burke's blessing.

"I have never worked with Mr. Bannon in his organisation and am not presently doing so," Burke said in response to the LifeSite story.

"I am not in any way in agreement with Mr. Bannon's assessment of the book in question," he added. 

Burke also resigned from his post of honorary president of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, founded by Benjamin Harnwell, Bannon's close associate in Europe.

The institute has been attempting to set up a would-be "gladiator school" for populists in a 13th-century Italian monastery, but Italy's culture ministry began taking the necessary legal action at the end of May to shut it down.

Burke said in his statement, published on Twitter on Tuesday, that the institute -- which purports to defend the Judeo-Christian West -- has "more and more identified with the political program" of Bannon.

The cardinal, a leading figure in the Roman Catholic Church's ultra-conservative hierarchy, is one of the pope's most vocal critics -- particularly over the clerical paedophilia crisis, which Burke has blamed on homosexuality.