Well, now here’s an interesting insight into Hillary Clinton’s popularity among Catholics.

It’s all because of the most powerful and influential force in the lives of many middle-aged Catholics.

I’m speaking, of course, of nuns.

From The New York Times today:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has run away with the votes of Roman Catholic Democrats in nearly all the primaries, often beating Barack Obama by two to one or better, exit polls show. In New York, she received 66 percent of the Catholic vote to his 30 percent.

“I didn’t go to bed until 1 in the morning waiting on the results,” said Joe Quinn, a Catholic who is a building superintendent on the Upper West Side. “I slept very well, let me tell you.”

Does it matter whom Catholics like Mr. Quinn voted for in the Democratic primaries? By November, it may not. Still, Catholics, who make up about a quarter of the registered voters in the country, have backed the winner of the national popular vote for at least the last nine presidential elections, going back to 1972.

The Catholic scorecard: five Republican and three Democratic presidents, and one popular-vote-winning but presidency-losing Democrat, Al Gore.

No other large group has switched sides so often, or been so consistently aligned with the winners. Over that same period, a majority of white Protestants typically voted Republican, while blacks of all faiths and Jews strongly backed Democrats.

“Catholics are the last swing voters left in the country,” said Brian O’Dwyer, a Manhattan lawyer and a Clinton supporter.

So why Mrs. Clinton? Catholics are scattered across the American landscape, with the sun having long set on the empire of the parish, a source of boundary and social identity. No single explanation for Mrs. Clinton’s current success could credibly cover enough ground. That did not stop New Yorkers from trying.

Mr. O’Dwyer maintains that Mrs. Clinton as a senator — and Bill Clinton, as president — paid attention to ethnic and working-class Catholics who were often overlooked by both parties. “Every one of the ethnic groups got a hearing,” he said, making them comfortable with Mrs. Clinton’s position on Social Security, health care, education and immigration. And both Clintons, he said, had played central roles in brokering an end to the armed conflict in Northern Ireland.

Another, more daring idea is that Mrs. Clinton owes some of her success to the nuns who were once a potent presence in American Catholicism.

This notion was floated by Catherine T. Nolan, who attended St. Aloysius elementary school in Queens and now represents her old neighborhood in the State Assembly. She noted that older Catholic voters grew up with women in charge of daily life.

“Maybe we’re a little bit more open to female leadership,” said Ms. Nolan, chairwoman of the Assembly Education Committee, one of the most powerful legislative posts in Albany. “We had female role models from an early age. When I was growing up, all the Catholic school principals were women, and almost none of the public school principals were. That’s changed now, but we’ve been used to female authority figures for much longer than other groups.”

Read on for more. Fascinating stuff.