Two of the older children willingly followed their mother into the Roman Catholic Church. Florence and her twin went through the terrors of a first confession, but as she later put it, [h]uman nature does not like being slapped in the face, and both of them, but particularly Florence, were early sceptics and rebels. Her rebellion against Christian dogma (a male god with no female to accompany him) had begun at the age of three.

After her mother 's conversion Lady Gertrude Douglas (later GD ) lost no time in becoming a Catholic herself. She was received into the Church as soon as she arrived in France.

Edith Cooper and Katharine Harris Bradley (known as the poet MF ) were each received into the Roman Catholic Church.

GF felt that her parents and teachers had inculcated reverence in her for religious matters, yet had left her religious education imperfect and scanty. She gives a similar upbringing in religion to the heroine of her novel Too Strange not to be True, 1864. Nonetheless, in the extracts from her memoir published in the Life of Lady Georgiana Fullerton she makes her conversion sound inevitable. She there notes that TixallHall left on her a deep indelible impression of the Catholic traditions of which the place is full, and also mentions the early influence of reading François René Chateaubriand 's Catholic defence of Christianity, Génie du Christianisme. Of this book she says that the poetry of the ideas and of the style fascinated me.

Her father's death plunged the PresbyterianHW into a crisis of religious faith and a conviction that the goodness of God was a myth. Hating the Puritanism in which she had grown up, its stress on conscience and will, she fell into a despair from which she was rescued by the discovery of St Augustine and of medieval Latin poetry. She now wanted to combine beauty with religion, and was strongly drawn towards the forbidden Catholicism , but she kept her conflict hidden, and her visit to a Catholic church was in secret. She later wrote to her sister, I'll never be a Catholic, but I'd never get my work done if I didn't now and then dive into that strange divine sea.

Scholarly debate continues to rage on the question of whether WS subscribed to the Church of England or whether he adhered to the minority and persecuted Old Religion of Catholicism . Supporters of the Catholic thesis include Michael Wood and Richard Wilson .Germaine Greer strongly disagrees with what she calls dismissively the elaborate argument that seeks to prove that Shakespeare was as Catholic as the pope.

AS has been discussed as a religious writer who, slightly ahead of her time, intuited the need for a feminist revision of patriarchal monotheism. She centred a play on the Roman Catholic Mass, and some of her poems dwell on the body of the Virgin Mary as well as that of Christ. She refused to talk about her personal religious beliefs, which gathered strength over her lifetime. The protagonist of her unfinished novel jokingly expresses her indecision: Last year I was almost a Catholic by choice, but decided it would be too flashy a move and perhaps Jesus would understand my feelings for him although I was not a member of His Church.

Brought up by a Roman Catholic foster-mother, sent to an Anglican mission school at thirteen and made to change her religion from one day to the next, she wrote later that for years she had harboured a terrible and blind hatred for missionaries and for the Christianity which they represented, and once I left the mission I never set foot in a Christian church again. She read deeply in Hinduism, found it very rich and deep in concepts compared with Christianity, and remained involved with it throughout her life. Always deeply spiritual in her interests and approach to life, she evolved her own religion, and was not afraid of inconsistency. She asked her son to call a Catholic priest when she died, which he did. Yet she rejected Christianity with its history of exclusions, preferring to see God not in specific places but in everything, cherishing a sense of worship for all life (though always acutely sensitive to what she saw as evil).

GMH had found the liberal and progressive ethos of Balliol a strain, and set himself against it. His Anglican practices became more and more high, to the extent of making confession and kissing the floor before an image of the Virgin Mary. In 1866 he converted to the Roman Catholic Church .

Born into the rising and prosperous English trading class, with strong gentry connections, SH was baptised into the Church ofEngland . Possibly out of loyalty to her dead father, who worked for the royal family, or reaction against the Dissenting religion and parliamentary politics of her stepfather, she became during the English Civil War an active supporter of the royalist cause and a convert for several years to RomanCatholicism . As a reconverted Anglican she devoted considerable energy to the welfare of her chosen church, but never lost her sympathy with Catholic practices.

Her husband, like her parents, was Roman Catholic . Despite periods when she neglected churchgoing or doubted her faith, she considered herself a Catholic to the end of her life. She was particularly devout in her last ten years.

She says she was indifferent to religion as a child, and was attracted to churches more by atmosphere than by any religious practice.On atmosphere, she leaned to the Catholic Church (she had first cousins who were Catholics), loving its smell and feel, the fact that it was warm and embracing, whereas in the antiseptic atmosphere and emptiness of Church of Ireland buildings, you felt terribly alone and confronted with God.Her parents did not have either her or her brother christened when they were born—an omission that carried a terrible social stigma.Jennifer then acquired the awful mythology of Limbo from her Catholic friends, and she and her brother were christened after she refused to go to school on her bicycle for six weeks, believing that she would go straight to Limbo where [she] would spend a horrible Eternity if she fell off and was run over by a tram. Commentator Rachael Sealy Lynch regards Johnston as influenced by her at least nominal membership in the Church of Ireland at a date when an Irish Protestant had become an anomaly.

Her family had been Roman Catholic back in 1605, at the height of Catholic unrest and persecution of Catholics in England.EL , however, came from a liberal Unitarian background: her father (to whom she was devoted) was brought up a Unitarian by his own father (who was strong in that faith), but later converted to the Church of England . EL was an Anglican with a special affection for Unitarians, and some indignation that despite their noble, generous, Christlike lives they were so often misrepresented as though they were not Christians at all. She was a committed Protestant who wrote with admiration of the parliamentarian and the Whig heroes of the mid and later seventeenth century. In 1873 she was deeply impressed by a meeting run by the US revivalists Moody and Sankey . In January 1881 she went through some kind of crisis in her faith (earnestly seeking the truth through a cloud of doubt) from which she was helped to recover by her cousin the Rev. Philip Newnham .

Brought up a Presbyterian , SM was received into the Anglo-Catholic church in 1972 (the year of her marriage and of her husband's appointment as a parish priest) and later became a Roman Catholic .

At seven, [l]ike every other little Catholic body, she was confirmed and made her first Communion. About this time, while endeavouring to achieve holiness, she felt her endeavour undermined or reversed by a startlingly mundane encounter with the Devil in her garden at home. By sixteen or earlier she was no longer a Catholic, but she was left with a sense of guilt.

A Roman Catholic , FM also developed an interest in spiritualism.

She was an Irish gentlewoman and apparently a Roman Catholic or ex-Catholic, though of heterodox tendencies. She goes into some detail in discussing the doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church, but is highly critical of them. On the one hand she once suspected a Jesuit plot against her; on the other hand she approves of the Reformation. She mentions a couple of supernatural experiences during her youth: one while sitting with her mother's dead body, and one when a visitation of well-dressed people became visible to her at night, whom nobody else could see.

He came from an Irish Catholic family, though he spent much of his adulthood in England. Despite his Catholic upbringing, he lived like a Protestant and thought like a Deist.

Brought up a Catholic , KOBlost her faith while still at school; however, even without intellectual belief, she retained a strong emotional attachment to the religion of her forebears. Lorna Reynolds calls her a Catholic agnostic.

GA 's writings treat in detail the Jewish faith to which she strongly adhered, and she often focuses on the persecution and prejudice which Jews suffered throughout the nineteenth century, as well as historically. As critic Michael Galchinsky argues, the practices and culture of crypto-Judaism, whereby Jews evaded the Inquisition by passing for Catholic while retaining their ancestral faith in private, considerably influenced both the form and content of her work. Despite her intense commitment to improving the standing of her people through her writing, her friend Anna Maria Hall avers that she and her husband could only with difficulty get GA to speak on religious topics and were quite unacquainted with her religious habits. However, her continuing dedication to Judaism, and her identification of herself with her Sephardic Jewish heritage—which she also considered a nationality—was obvious to those who knew her, and she may have been a proto-Zionist: the natural and unaffected eloquence of her words, when referring to the past history of the Jews . . . and the positive radiance of her countenance when she spoke of the gathering of the tribes at Jerusalem, could never be forgotten . . . .

A century later, the writer Kate O'Brien told a probably apocryphal story about the Alexander family's ecumenism. The Viceroy of Ireland, she says, wanted to have a strictly private and apparently casual word in confidence both with the Primate of Ireland and with his neighbour the Roman Catholic Cardinal Logue . Under the pretence of a duck-shooting trip, the Viceroy dropped in for lunch with Alexander, had his first talk, and left, he said, to catch a train to Dublin. In fact he dropped in for tea with the Cardinal—where he found the elder Miss Alexander ensconced behind the teapot as hostess, a position she often filled for the Cardinal.

It seems AA was arrested twice this year, for speaking against the Sacrament. The second time was on 13 June. She was questioned by Edmund Bonner , Bishop of London, but later acquitted for lack of witnesses. It seems that at this date he was concerned more about the heterodoxy of Askew's beliefs than with her connections and contacts, whom he had not yet guessed to be important. Her divorce was denied about the same time. She may have signed a Catholic credo (though evidence is conflicting). She was nevertheless pulled in for questioning again almost at once, but released, and went north (to her brother, not her husband).

BB was born into the English lower middle class. She says her family had been quite well off until the slump of 1929, but then they had lost everything. She converted to Catholicism during her late teenage years. She was received into the Church while acting in Scotland, which was convenient because in England she would legally have needed her parents' consent, being under age. She received her religious instruction from a nun. Later she became a lapsed Catholic.

She was a Christian believer of sentimental cast, who liked to see spiritual significance in details of her life. Brought up as an Anglican , she learned from a French Catholic servant to cherish and pray to a shrine to the Virgin. She was, however, enthusiastic about the Welsh-speaking services of a Dissenting chapel in Wales from the first time that she attended it. She not only prayed at moments of personal crisis but believed in God's active, frequent intervention in her life. When widowed for the second time, she turned increasingly to . . . spiritualism (without relinquishing her Christianity) and actually practised as a faith-healer through her custodianship of what she called the Miracle Stone, which spent each night in the shrine to the Virgin in her bedroom.