I stumbled across this essay this morning and thought: “Well here’s something you don’t see every day.” It’s about how a Steubenville pro-life EWTN-watching, daily-mass-attending young Catholic came to support Barack Obama:

I started my freshman year at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, when I was barely 17, skipping my senior year of high school in my enthusiasm to get started on Catholic higher education. I quickly joined Students for Life, the campus pro-life group, and began spending Saturday mornings with 6 am mass and an hour drive to Pittsburgh to pray in front of the abortion clinic. That first year I was a bus captain on the trip to Washington, D.C. for the March for Life, as well as head of the Students for Life Prayer Team. I was interviewed on the conservative Catholic TV station EWTN as a young pro-life leader.

On my breaks from school, I worked at my hometown’s Catholic bookstore, where I reorganized the books based on theological theme and offered customers advice about saints, prayer, and the like. I also volunteered at the local crisis pregnancy center, where we offered free pregnancy tests, infant formula, children’s clothing, and other services to help women who were pregnant and needed extra support. I went to daily mass and weekly confession, as I had since high school. I marched in the occasional local abortion protest. I read theology in my free time.

I was, in other words, the perfect Steubenville Catholic student: devoted to my prayer life, diligent in my studies, involved in student life, and passionate about the pro-life cause.

My Steubenville honeymoon was not to last, however.

Continue reading the rest to find out why.