ABSTRACT
A banner reading “The Bible. Cure for Sodomy” was deemed to be sufficiently inflammatory that the police escorting the National Pilgrimage of Our Lady of Walsingham in 2004 required that it be taken down (Figure 10.1).1 Disgust at this official line can be found, as a component of a substantial campaign of vilification of the shrine, on the website of the European Institute of Protestant Studies (EIPS), which is housed in the Paisley Jubilee Complex of the Martyrs’ Memorial Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast. Its President is Ian Paisley, First Minister of Northern Ireland from May 2007 to June 2008, founder and Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast, and possessor of an honorary doctorate from the evangelical Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. The purpose of the institute is to “expound the Bible and expose the Papacy,” and it offers courses that include “showing Roman Catholics the way to Christ,” “False doctrines of Roman Catholicism,” and “The Church of Rome and Politics (an exposure of the Vatican conspiracy to overthrow civil government from the twelfth century to the present, with particular emphasis on the history of Papal assaults against Britain and Rome’s contemporary involvement in the European Union).”2
