A former English Premiership referee's personal website has been suspended after an offensive rant against the Catholic Church and Celtic appeared on the blog.

The blog entry, posted under the name of Jeff Winter, asked whether "altar boys" would get "abused in celebration" after Celtic won the latest Old Firm game last month.

The post on the 56-year-old’s website also described Pope Benedict XVI as "dress wearing, Nazi, kiddy fiddling protector".

On Thursday morning, web hosting company 123-Reg suspended the site after the post was widely circulated on social media site Twitter. The company refused to comment on the reasons behind the move.

Mr Winter has worked as a pundit for Sky Sports and Talksport Radio since retiring as an official in 2004 and has performed on the after-dinner speaker circuit.

His blog post was meant to be charting a winter trip around New Zealand and Australia.

In the middle of describing his travels, the blog contains an abbreviation known as an offensive reference to the Pope and refers to Celtic’s home ground as "Septick Park" (sic).

Peter Kearney, director of the Scottish Catholic Media Office, said: "Not only is it not banter this goes way beyond comment on football.

"I mean the comments made here, if they prove to be correct, take us into a different realm altogether. And they do constitute the most outrageous religious hatred."

On his official Twitter account Mr Winter describes himself as a supporter of Middlesbrough and Rangers. In November 2010 he was pictured attending Rangers’ 3-1 win over St Mirren in Paisley.

The post, made on December 30, has been followed by several other blog entries since and has been widely circulated on Twitter.

Football pundit Gabriele Marcotti revealed he had contacted Mr Winter about the posts to establish whether or not the site had been hacked and had received a reply saying Mr Winter's website manager was looking into it.

Strathclyde Police said they had been made aware of the remarks and were carrying out enquiries into it.

Celtic FC confirmed they had taken legal advice over the post and made a complaint to the police regarding it.