Peter West, an avowed supporter of President Donald Trump, doesn't shrink from calling it as he sees it.

Posting on Facebook and Twitter up to a dozen times a day, he has repeatedly railed against Muslims, calling moderate Islam "a myth" and voicing strong support for the president's travel ban, which temporarily barred immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries before a judge issued a stay last week.

West has assailed millennials as "snowflakes" who attend "cry-ins" and described liberals as "smug and arrogant" people who find solace in puppies and Play-Doh.

He has called Hillary Clinton an "evil witch" and former President Barack Obama a "bum," at one point sharing a post that challenged Obama's authenticity as an African-American because he wasn't raised by a poor single mother in the inner city.

Were West some random internet flamethrower, his posts might garner a shrug in an age of intense political division and social media rancor.

But West, 57, is a Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Newark, and some of his withering attacks, while popular with many of his 7,300 Facebook followers from around the country, run counter to the statements and philosophies of his own leader, Newark Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, and his ultimate boss, Pope Francis.

Perhaps more significant, West's online behavior breaks with the longstanding protocol that religious figures should refrain from political bomb-throwing or the disparagement of other faiths, experts say.

The reluctance to campaign from the pulpit is rooted in the broad notion of separation of church and state and, more specifically, in a 1954 federal law.

Known as the Johnson Amendment, after former President Lyndon Johnson, the measure explicitly bars tax-exempt agencies, including the church, from participating in political campaigns and from endorsing or attacking candidates. Failure to comply can result in the loss of an institution's tax-exempt status.

Trump, speaking before religious leaders at the National Prayer Breakfast last week, vowed to "totally destroy" the Johnson Amendment, saying he wanted to "allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution." Such a move, however, would require congressional action.

West is not accused of stumping for Trump or denigrating the president's critics during church services, but his public musings on the internet raise questions about how politically active clergymen can or should be in their private lives before running afoul of the federal law.

A pro-life activist who previously served as vice president for missions at the group Human Life International, West is an associate pastor at St. John's Catholic Church in Orange, an ethnically diverse community in Essex County.

He declined to comment on his social media postings when approached by a reporter at the rectory last week, referring questions to Jim Goodness, a spokesman for the archdiocese.

In a statement to NJ Advance Media, Goodness said the archdiocese would move to curtail West's political pronouncements.

"Certainly, a priest doesn't give up his civil liberties when he is ordained, and he maintains the same right to freedom of expression as anyone else in the United States," Goodness said. "That said, we are concerned about Father West's comments and actions, and will be addressing them according to the protocols of the Church."

The spokesman declined to elaborate or answer additional questions.

A minority of commenters on West's Facebook page have denounced him as a "hatemonger" who promotes divisiveness, and at least one person complained about him to the archdiocese in December -- a development announced by West himself on Facebook.

His response? A harangue against "leftist apparatchiks" and "Comrade Obama."

Directly addressing the complainant, whom he did not name, West added: "You should be ashamed of yourself for supporting pro-abortion, anti-family politicians. If I get in trouble for denouncing them, so be it! But I won't be scared off by a totalitarian jerk like yourself!"

The Rev. John J. Dietrich, the director of spiritual formation at the nation's second largest seminary, Mount Saint Mary's in Maryland, called West's comments about politicians, Muslims and liberals "way over-the-top inappropriate behavior."

"The thrust of his priesthood is not to be political. The thrust of his priesthood is supposed to be sacramental, preaching the Scripture," Dietrich said, adding, "There's a red line you don't cross."

"We discuss things like this in the seminary," he said. "We would never countenance anything like this."

Catholic leaders in recent decades have navigated the intersection of religious belief and politics carefully, stressing, for instance, the sanctity of life but rarely launching personal attacks against politicians who support abortion rights.

One modern exception to the tread-lightly rule has been Cardinal Raymond Burke, a former St. Louis archbishop who made headlines in 2004 when he said presidential candidate John Kerry, then a U.S. senator, should be denied Communion because of his pro-choice views. Francis demoted Burke, also a vocal Trump supporter who has criticized Islam, to a largely ceremonial Vatican position in 2014 amid several public disagreements.

A handful of other outspoken priests took public political stances in the 20th century, said David Campbell, who has written about religion and politics as chairman of the American Democracy Department at Notre Dame University.

Those priests include the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who led protests against the Vietnam War, and the Rev. Charles Coughlin, an early radio talk show host who challenged the policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s.

But politically hard-charging Catholic priests remain a rarity, said Boston College theology professor Stephen J. Pope, an expert on Catholic social teaching.

"Catholic priests are forbidden from using their office and their priesthood to promote partisan political positions," Pope said. "A priest's job is to be a bridge-builder, not a wall-builder."

It's one thing, Pope added, for a priest or a bishop to reinforce issues important to Catholics in an election year. But as representatives of the church, he said, it's wholly improper for priests to savage candidates or elected leaders.

"The archbishop should bring him in and ask him to refrain from this, or he can leave the priesthood," Pope said. "He can't have it both ways. No priest has the right to hijack the church for his political agenda."

West's targets have varied over the years -- he once criticized former Republican Speaker John Boehner as "easy prey" for Obama -- but his bread-and-butter subjects are Democrats, particularly liberal Democrats, and Muslims.

On Nov. 12, for instance, he shared a post that read: "Liberals are acting like Trump is going to kill all the gays, make slavery legal again and take away women's rights. ... Like he's a Muslim or something."

While Cardinal Tobin and the Vatican have opposed the president's travel ban, West has repeatedly shared Facebook posts suggesting Muslim immigrants are a dire threat to the United States.

He also differs with the pope -- and has taken shots at the pontiff -- on the legitimacy of climate change, calling it a "hoax pushed by pro-abortion population controllers and Leftists who want to destroy Western economies based on faulty computer models with no real data to support it."

West doesn't apologize for his opinions, even if some find them offensive.

"People ask me, 'Father, shouldn't we try to convert liberals instead of making fun of them?'" he wrote on Facebook after the election. "My answer is that mocking is part of the conversion process."

Mark Mueller may be reached at mmueller@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MarkJMueller. Find NJ.com on Facebook.