A high-ranking Catholic Church official on Tuesday publicly insulted the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, when he called the openly gay diplomat a "wife" and told him to do "housework."

Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez, the archbishop of the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo, was apparently upset about comments Ambassador James "Wally" Brewster had made regarding local corruption, The Associated Press reported.

"That man needs to go back to his embassy," the 79-year-old Church leader demanded. "Let him focus on housework, since he's the wife to a man."

López, who participated as cardinal elector in the papal conclaves of 2005 and 2013, is known to have made similar homophobic statements in the past, The Advocate reported. Some of those comments, in fact, were already directed at Brewster, whom the priest had dubbed a "faggot" when President Barack Obama first announced his nomination in 2013.

According to the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo, Brewster, a native of Lindale, Texas, previously served as the national co-chair of the LGBT Leadership Council for the Democratic National Committee and held the same role in Obama's 2012 reelection campaign. While the diplomatic mission declined to comment on Tuesday's incident, it said that the ambassador would appear on a local TV news program on Thursday, The AP noted.

The latest outburst from the cardinal, who holds the symbolic title of "primate of America" since his diocese was the first erected in the New World, meanwhile, came after Brewster had accused local police officers of threatening and assaulting several U.S. investors, who were attending a conference organized by the Dominican government, The AP detailed.

"Imagine the horror I felt when I got a call from one of them, telling me they had been stopped by a uniformed police officer, that they had a weapon pointed at them and that they were forced to turn over their wallets," the ambassador had noted last week.