Article content

TORONTO — A senior aide to New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair apologized Tuesday after past tweets surfaced in which he took aim at the Roman Catholic church.

The two-year-old tweets by Shawn Dearn, hired in February as Mulcair’s director of communications, were also directed at the Pope.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Mulcair's senior aide apologizes for two-year-old tweet telling Pope Benedict to 'Go f--- ' himself Back to video

“Memo to CBC and all media,” one of them reads. “Stop calling the misogynist, homophobic, child-molesting Catholic church a ‘moral authority.’ It’s not.”

However, in a tweet to his followers late Tuesday, Dearn apologized.

“Some tweets that pre-dated my current role were offensive and do not reflect my views,” he said. “They are being deleted and I apologize sincerely.”

It was not immediately clear how the past tweets resurfaced.

Within hours of the Twitterverse taking new note of the posts, Dearn made his Twitter account private and therefore inaccessible to most users.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Dearn took aim at Pope Benedict for saying Britain’s human-rights policy on gay equality violated natural law. Dearn is married to a man.