A Catholic priest in Spain had to apologize for calling feminists a “herd of sows” on Twitter. He has deleted the messages, but the screen captions of them continue to circulate online.

“Why do I have to tolerate that a herd of sows tells me ‘the rapist is you?’ You are the rapists, [for] trying to force our consciences,” Father Franciso Rafael Gómez-Canoura tweeted last week.

The reference to “the rapist is you” comes from a Chilean feminist anthem that went viral in recent weeks called “A Rapist in Your Path.” The song was first performed in public on November 25 in Santiago, Chile by the feminist group Las Tesis outside the country’s Supreme Court to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

Though the original version of the anthem says nothing about the Catholic Church, some versions of it include the phrase “the rapist was the priest.”

The Archdiocese of Santiago, Spain, to which the priest belongs, released a statement praising the fact that the priest had apologized. It also reiterates the Church’s “commitment to the equal dignity between men and women and its rejection of every kind of violence.”

The same day the priest compared feminists to pigs, he called those who voted for a local party, as well as Spanish King Felipe VI, “idiots.”

By Tuesday of this week, he had deleted all of his tweets, saying it was an attempt to start over after “some things went wrong.”

On his blank Twitter account he acknowledged his previous message, describing it as “inappropriate and unfortunate.”

“Apologies to all those who were offended, it wasn’t my intention,” he wrote Dec. 17. “I have always been in favor of equality and against all types of violence.”

Follow Inés San Martín on Twitter: @inesanma

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