Well, here’s another of those “I-Had-No-Idea” moments.

I had no idea that President Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is Catholic.

From U.S. News & World Report:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is not predisposed to showing his personal side. So I was surprised to hear him invoking his Roman Catholicism in today’s White House press briefing in L’Aquila, Italy, on the eve of Obama’s first visit with Pope Benedict:

…the question as it relates to the influence of Catholic social teaching on the President, I would say something that I’ve been quite impacted by myself, I would offer. The President, in both his words and in his deeds, expresses many things that many Catholics recognize as fundamental to our teaching.

I was also surprised by Gibbs’s grasp of Catholicism’s influence on Obama personally and the way he framed it as a basis for pushing the president’s healthcare plan. This is not the kind of thing Democratic press secretaries were doing five years ago:

One is that the President often refers to the fundamental belief that each person is endowed with dignity, and as it relates to the issues I work on most frequently with the President, the President often underscores that dignity of people is a driving goal in what we hope to accomplish in development policy, for example, and in foreign policy. That’s one.

Two, I’ve also heard the President speak very movingly about what Cardinal Bernadin called the seamless garment of Catholic teaching. That garment speaks to not just taking care of the poor and the needy but also investing in the kind of health care infrastructure that would ensure that people like those on the South Side of Chicago, who the President is very familiar with are oftentimes finding their health care not in publicly funded hospitals but in Catholic hospitals, for example.

You can check out more of this at the U.S. News link.