In an interview with a Catholic news agency Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue, the retiring Bishop of Lancaster, said university-educated Catholics were misinterpreting Church teachings.

In Catholic newpaper The Tablet Bishop O'Donoghue is reported to have said: "The Second Vatican Council tends to be misinterpreted most by Catholics with a university education – this is, by those most exposed to the intellectual and moral spirit of the age.

"These well-educated Catholics have gone on to occupy influential positions in education, the media, politics and even the Church, where they have been able to spread their so-called loyal, dissent, causing confusion and discord in the whole church."

One leading Preston Catholic, who did not want to be named, said she thought the Bishop truly believed what he was saying, but accused him of driving people away.

She said: "I weep for my church because I feel it will become a sect.

"What the Bishop is doing is showing all the dictatorial things which are wrong about sects. I am angry and feel attacked. What he is saying is we are to pray, pay, obey but don't have a say."

Frank Harrington, senior lecturer in religion, culture and society at the University of Central Lancashire, said: "For me, Vatican II was a landmark event. It enabled changes to many aspects of Catholic life and worship and it both liberated and empowered the laity.

"We need to understand this world, and our Catholicism is one of the contexts within which we do this.

"That we do this as educated intellectuals is no accident, but we are not setting out to destroy the church, but rather to make sense of it in a modern context."

>> Vote in our latest web poll