The author of the essay below wondered that about himself — and he comes up with a pretty good answer.

From the Washington Post’s On Faith section :

In the end it wasn’t Thomas Aquinas, Pope Benedict or even St. Teresa of Avila – my favorite saint – who brought me all the way home. It was Sister Carol.

Sister Carol is the principal of St. Mary’s Catholic grade school in Rockville, Maryland. This past year I was a substitute teacher a few times at St. Mary’s, and it was there that I discovered what kind of Catholic I am. That is to say, that I’m not a liberal Catholic or a conservative Catholic. I’m just Catholic.

When I first met Sr. Carol, I knew I had to be careful. Since the 1960s there has been what journalist and former Catholic Rod Dreher refers to as an “undeclared schism” in the Church.

On one side are the liberal Catholics, who specialize in social justice and the poor. They are in the tradition of Dorothy Day: critics of consumer capitalism and helpers of the poor, against war and nuclear weapons, champions of Vatican II, the 1960s council that sought to modernize the church. They read E.J. Dionne, the New York Times, Commonweal magazine. Homosexuality doesn’t bother them, but the fact that the church will not allow female priests does.

On the other side are the conservatives. Willing to call Iraq a just war (with some cause I think), and pro-capitalist, they insist that Vatican in no way called for the changes that liberals assume. They watch EWTN – Mother Angelica’s orthodox network – read First Things, join the pro-free market Acton Institute, and love Justices Scalia and Thomas. Most importantly, they are pro-life, noting that to be such is to be classically liberal: that the pro life cause is about social justice for the weak and vulnerable as much as the Civil Rights movement was.

So which would Sister Carol be?

I had been to Catholic schools to inquire about teaching jobs, and had attended a conference of Catholic schoolteachers, and knew that many of the school were segregated along ideological lines. Yet I knew nothing about St. Mary’s. I considered myself a conservative; when I returned to the church in the early 1990s it was largely due to rediscovering great Catholic figures that I had never been taught about – people like Dietrich von Hildebrand, G.K. Chesterton, Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein. I had not been taught about them because the Catholic educational establishment had been largely taken over by liberals, who after Vatican II and the 1960s wanted to jettison the great Catholic thinkers of the past to focus on the social issues of the day – all the while ignoring abortion, which is the great civil rights and social justice issue of our day.

By the time I got to Georgetown Prep in the early 1980s, I had no idea who St. Augustine, Ignatius Loyola or Theresa of Lisieux were. Instead, I was taught existential philosophy by a man who left the Jesuits after I graduated, came out of the closet and then moved in with a student who was a year behind me. My sex-ed teacher, Bernie Ward, became a left-wing radio talk show host. He recently pleaded guilty to trafficking in child pornography. Besides learning about Kant and Camus and Sartre at Prep, I drank a lot of beer.

A few years ago I published a book about my experiences in Catholic education. It was praised by conservative Catholics and ignored by liberals.

And yet, there were things that liberal Catholics emphasized – and allowed – that I found appealing. The first was good music. It’s hard to decide which is a more potent destroyer of joy — root canal or the music in most Catholic churches. Bland doesn’t begin to describe the flat dirges that one has to mumble through on any given Sunday; some of the hymns seem positively anti-music, as if someone had gone through and made sure to erase any signs of melody, harmony or beauty. And the place to find great music in mass is often in the liberal churches. On Sundays I either go to the tradition Latin mass at St. Mary Mother of God in Chinatown — a church that is a nerve center of Catholic orthodoxy — but also to St. Aloysius, a grubby basement church adjacent to Gonzaga high school near Union Station. At St. Al’s you will find copies of the leftist paper The Catholic Worker, women standing all throughout the mass in protest of an all-male clergy, breaks in the service that often resemble happy hours, and prayer petitions to end the Iraq war.

You’ll also find fantastic gospel music. The first time I went to St. Al’s, I had an unexpected sensation, one that had never happened to me in church before. As the choir sang “Hold Back the Night,” I felt uplifting joy, a profound sense of bliss that Jesus had not only come to earth an suffered and died, but that he had risen again and is alive in resplendent glory. Yes, at times things got too casual for me – one man actually had a conversation with the priest during the service, and the sign of peace resembled a cocktail party – but I also powerfully felt what I hadn’t in many other churches: the presence of the Holy Spirit.

But even more than music is the liberals’ emphasis on immigration. A few months before my interview with Sister Carol, I was listening to conservative talk show host and Catholic convert Laura Ingraham. I’m a fan. Ingraham fights for the pro-life cause and wears her faith proudly, a cross displayed on her torso when she appears on TV. On the radio that day, Ingraham was hammering one of her favorite topics — illegal immigration. Like many conservatives, Ingraham likes to take individual cases of illegal immigrants committing crimes and extrapolate htat we are living in a holocaust of crime and lost jobs due to the tsunami of people pouring over the Southern border. As I listen to Ingraham itemize the destruction, a thought came to my mind.

What about mercy?

Ingraham seemed to be ignoring the prime directive of the gospel — welcoming the stranger. Not to mention the larger goal of sainthood, the imitation of Christ that fills us with, as Pope Benedict put it, “the love that goes all the way.” The love that goes to the cross.

So what kind of Catholic was Sister Carol?

Visit the WaPo link to find out. (By happy coincidence, St. Mary’s in Rockville is where my wife and I were married 23 years ago.)