Lifesite news columnist Kathleen Gilbert was at my debate with Andrew Sullivan  at Georgetown on Wednesday and files this report--and asks this question:

"It was only when Sullivan talked about any Catholic other than himself that the warm rhetoric surrounding Catholicism began to grow ice cold.

The vast majority of the Catholic hierarchy, Sullivan asserted, cruelly suppress homosexuals (and “the reason they’re not OK with gay people is because they’re gay.”) Thanks to them, the hierarchy is rife with pedophiles - which, Sullivan acknowledged, were homosexual priests with a more twisted appetite.

As for the pope, words appeared not to be strong enough to express Sullivan’s anger. “The current pope, knowing that a child under his auspices had been raped by a priest under his authority, covered it up and sent that rapist to go rape other children,” he stated, referring to media accusations against Joseph Ratzinger regarding Rev Huellerman of Munich. The room, in a moment that will forever blacken the history of Georgetown, erupted in applause.

In any event, the lesson appeared to be that the pope, hierarchy, and the dogma they taught were far less Catholic than Sullivan himself.

I wondered what it was that defined Sullivan’s idea of “Catholicism.” It was unlikely to be the Bible, given Paul’s statement to Roman Christians that God punished mankind with “degrading passions” in which “their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another.”

So who decides what Catholicism is? After reducing the name “Catholic” to a mere shell (not unlike “marriage,” which Sullivan tellingly asserted “is what you believe it is”), why even keep the name? That, it seems, was the unasked question at the crux of the show."