A religious charity run by three hermits living on Orkney could be wound up after they were thrown out of the Catholic church for calling the Pope a heretic.

The charity, The Lord's Garden, exists to promote Christianity and the Roman Catholic faith and to set up a "Catholic monastic centre on the Island of Mull" and other places. There is also a company of the same name, formerly called The Black Hermits, which is the name the three have called their religious "order".

However, this newspaper understands that complaints have been made to the Scottish charity regulator calling for an investigation into the charity's status following the excommunications. The banishing of the group is believed to be the first such since the Reformation.

The Black Hermits are highly committed and controversial group. Before they moved to the island of Westray they were forced to leave a presbytery house in the Diocese of Northampton over the behaviour of one of them, Brother Damon Kelly, who was arrested for distributing leaflets alleged by the police to be homophobic. He also barged into an Argyllshire church service wearing black robes and screaming: "This is the synagogue of sin."

Hours later he forced himself into a nearby Church of Scotland claiming he was "doing God's work" by disrupting prayers. He was convicted of threatening and abusive behaviour and sentenced to 180 hours of unpaid work.

He has also pleaded guilty to harassment for telling a lesbian couple: "We used to burn people like you." In all he has been arrested more than a dozen times for similar behaviour.

The Black Hermits were founded by Stephen de Kerdrel, a former Capuchin monk, who was joined by Kelly and by Colette Farrell-Roberts, a former A&E consultant, who describes herself as a nun. De Kerdrel and Farrell-Roberts are directors of the company, limited by guarantee, which, according to its 2018 accounts, had a turnover of £35,636, but made a loss of just over £6000.

The Black Hermits run a website, www.trumpeteer.co.uk, which preaches their uncompromising message against abortion, gay and transphobic people and the "poisonous ideology of Evolution".

But it is for refusing to recant over describing the Pope as a heretic that they were expelled from the church. They wrote: "Tragically the head of the Church on Earth, Pope Francis, by his utterances, his behaviour, his teaching and his actions, has shown himself to be indeed a great heretic. He has proclaimed that no-one goes to Hell, he has undermined the indissolubility of marriage, he has approved of couples living together, he has behaved in an ambiguous fashion towards homosexuals ... in outright contradiction to the First Commandment, [he] has said that God has willed all religions, and that this must be taught throughout the Church in her seminaries, her universities, and her schools."

In their joint declaration the Black Hermits add: "We have most reluctantly had to take such a drastic stand because the successors of the Apostles, namely the Bishops, faced with the horror of an Apostate Pope have failed to defend the gates of the Church, as the hordes of Hell ransack so much of the City of God."

In another post the "LGBT revolution" is described as the work of a small minority "drenched with sex". It goes on to say Hitler and Nazism, as well as communism, were less "revolutionary" than "the LGBT".

"At least with Nazism and Communism, although they are demonic ideologies, there was a real desire to help the people; with Hitler that meant the German people, the Volk. Communism wanted to help the workers throughout the world create a classless Utopia.

"Both Nazism and Communism conceived things on a grand scale. One only has to look at Albert Speer’s model for Germania – Hitler’s dream capital for the Third Reich – and Stalinist architecture in the old Soviet Union, to realize that both men thought in gargantuan terms, and slaves from the Concentration camps and the Gulags, in their millions, were to make such dreams come true. However, these modern tyrannies are not as revolutionary as the LGBT, for these sexual utopians want to change Man, and change the way we think about him".

In another post, railing against homosexuality, "Jonah" (understood to be Kelly) writes about the "Gay Marriage Act" of 2014: "I leafleted Cambridge. The title of the leaflets was The True Nature of Marriage and the Cult of Homosexuality, and during the course of the next 2 years I put out some 55,000 leaflets in 28 towns and cities in England, all dealing with different aspects of Christian morality and secular/humanist immorality; though the predominant themes were LGBT related.

"During this time I was arrested 13 times, spent a total of 146 hours in police custody, notched up 22 court appearances, and was rewarded with 5 convictions for 'homophobic/transphobic' related offences. I became a 'criminal for Christ'."

He adds that over 30 years: "I wasn’t particularly troubled by thoughts or dreams of naked black men and any sexual temptations I had were almost entirely 'hetero-sexual'. Yet at the height of my anti-LGBT campaign I was visited by the Devil in the form of a tall, near naked black man walking through the streets of Corby, Northamptonshire. He was wearing the skimpiest of shorts (it was in August), he had braided hair and a luxuriantly muscled body. No-one seemed to take much notice of this extraordinary sight except myself, though it wasn’t the kind of thing one sees every day. Was he only visible to me? God only knows. But how easily the seed of the serpent is sown through the follies and sins of youth. He who has not Christ, the demon rides."

Sister Colette, in a post about the "depravity of the church", says "two of my very close relatives whom I love, were both sexually molested by a religious brother whilst they were in junior seminary in the 1960’s (sic). The man who did this is now dead. I have also known, or at least met, priests who were having heterosexual sex, homosexual sex, and one who was propositioning vulnerable adult men (I reported him and he was removed from active ministry, and he is also now dead)."

Turning on the Pope, she says: "I am only concerned here with the heresies against the Truths of Faith, and the way that Pope Francis is preaching directly against Christ’s words. Words that cannot be changed, and if it were I that were to do so, I would be rightfully be condemned as a heretic, so why is not Francis Bergoglio?"

In their appeal for donations the three say that they want to create a garden that "will be a faint reflection of the Garden of Eden where God walked in the cool of the evening". However, rather than giving the charity's bank details, they ask for cheques to be made out to Fr Stephen de Kerdrel and those wanting to set up a direct debit to email Colette Roberts for details.

Roberts responded to The Herald on Sunday: "Christ did not perform miracles during his life on earth such as the feeding of the 5,000, and the recent promotion of worship of false gods by the placement of the sacrifice to the goddess Pachamama [an Inca fertility goddess] on the High altar in St Peters in the Vatican during Mass. We knew that we had to separate ourselves from such abominations for the sake of our souls and that of others."

She added that the Black Hermits website has not been updated, "as we do not have enough electricity to put use our desktop computer to put anything on our website until the Orkney daylight is strong enough to provide more electricity".