Another Transcript

Well, the Hewitt Inquisition got a lot of play out there. So, for balance, here's the transcript of an actual interview with someone with no agenda, CSPAN's Brian Lamb. The video is also available on the same site. Here's a section on faith:

LAMB: I don’t know quite how to ask this without sounding abrupt, but how can you then stay in the Catholic church and stay a conservative when both places are not terribly friendly?

SULLIVAN: Well, let me answer both sides of that question. In the Catholic church, not without a great deal of struggle and difficulty and pain. And, in fact, I spent the last few years have been the loneliest. I couldn’t go to mass for a while after the child abuse scandal and then the fact they blamed it on gays in general. I just I felt dumbfounded by that and I felt too much anger when I went into the church to be able to be in any way in a state to witness the mass.

But in the last year I have gradually come back to mass. And I’ll tell you simply why, I love it. It's my home. And the sacrament of the Eucharist is such a miracle to me. It's been part of my life from the very beginning. I absolutely believe it is a unique way to encounter the Divine. And to be shut out of that for something I don’t think actually is integral to being a bad person. I really don’t. I don’t think my relationship [with Aaron] is in God’s eye a bad thing. I’ve searched my soul about that and I don’t think it is.

So it's who I am. It's my home. Why should I leave my home? Where would I go? And my fellow Catholics, lay Catholics, people who you don't see on TV, people who aren't in the hierarchy are much more understanding and compassionate about the subject than the hierarchy is allowed to be in public. And even the priests that I know, though they do not and cannot say it's OK, are not going to throw me out of a church I desperately feel a part of and care about.

And the book is in part an analysis of how faith can exist under those circumstances.

Sometimes, I think faith can come alive when you are somehow excluded from it for a while. Or when you cling to faith despite the pain. Only then do you realize how deeply you need God's love. And how deeply you truly are loved by Him.