MB was a Roman Catholic and a humanist, like the rest of her English, professional-class, and unusually scholarly family.

This family spanned a number of the influences she would later reject: her mother was a fervent Catholic and her father a conservative in politics and in cultural choices, whereas as a young woman she became an atheist and a socialist. Her mother took her to church as soon as she could walk, and explained the benevolent care for her of saints and of her own guardian angel. My heaven was constellated with a myriad benevolent eyes. During World War One, Simone, who had been a passionate small child given to tantrums, embarked on a career of being good. She was introduced to the sweet delights of confession, and behaved to such effect that her confessor congratulated her mother upon the radiant beauty of [her] soul. Approaching her first communion, and encouraged by her mother though not by the nursemaid, she invented every kind of mortification, sacrifice and edifying behaviour. Her fervent piety continued until, when she was in her teens, her confessor gave her a little lecture about social bad behaviour of hers, which had come to his ears by gossip. This seemed to her debased and unspiritual; but for the moment she contented herself with finding a different confessor. Not long afterwards she realised that she no longer believed in God. Always an extremist, she went straight from total belief to total unbelief, though this left with her a terror of death and the realization of being alone.

She was brought up in the Anglican church, but very definitely as one of the Anglo-Catholic minority. After her brother's death she turned against religion.

She was brought up a Catholic but became a sceptic, apart from a continuing superstitious feeling about religion.

MEB 's mother, the daughter of a Catholic father and Protestant mother, was from county Cavan in Ireland. She brought up her daughter as a Protestant Anglican , but Mary Elizabeth was later tolerant of her step-children's Catholicism. She said as to religion . . . I cling to the simplest faith, and she was a regular church attender. Her sympathies seem to have been against evangelicalism. Her fiction often casts as villains those who disbelieve in Christ, and several of her novels mock current trends in religion.

Lady Elizabeth Cavendish's birth family was not remarkable for its piety, but she may have been an exception among them. As an unmarried girl she wrote her name in a copy of St Peter's Complaint, the longest poem by the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic poet Robert Southwell . As a grown woman and an Anglican she lived an intense devotional life, as her writings show. Each year from 1660 to 1662 she applied for a dispensation from the religious duty of refraining from meat in Lent.

On the publication of her first book, the Critical Review implied that some of her opinions sounded like those of a Catholic . Defending herself, MB claimed to be irreproachably orthodox, that is Anglican , in her religion.

FB was serious about her Anglican faith, but much more sympathetic towards Roman Catholicism , which was practised by her maternal grandmother, than most Anglicans of her day, even before she married a Catholic.

She has sometimes been said to be a Catholic (perhaps because her husband's family had long had leanings that way); but she was an Anglican who explained in her Philosophical Letters that she followed the Athanasian Creed in her faith in a Trinity which is Incomprehensible both in its individual members and in its totality.

She was born into a supportive, professional English family. Travel in France and exposure to the Oxford Movement made EC consider converting to the Roman Catholic Church later in life. However, she remained an Anglican , a decision influenced by a Swiss Protestant pastor. EC always had a wide tolerance of other faiths.

AC was a devout Christian believer. One group of her editors think she was possibly Roman Catholic , certainly anti-Calvinist; another group thinks she was Calvinist in sympathy.

CFC 's formidable Anglican faith came equally from both parents. Her religious convictions occupied a central place in her life. Though she was strongly anti-Catholic, she eventually turned away from her mother's Evangelicalism and became more High Church. This did not, however, harm their relationship.

Shortly before the revoking of the Edict of Nantes on 22 October (when as Protestants they would have lost their claim to tolerance and religious freedom) AD and her husband were received into the Roman Catholic Church as converts from Protestantism.

At twenty-one, having come of age, Edmée de la Pasture (later EMD ) entered a Catholic convent, the mother house of an enclosed order in Belgium.

Brought up a Catholic , CAD early became an agnostic. She has said that she retain[s] some of the motifs of all that and none of the feelings; faith, guilt, whatever. I do envy people who have a religious faith—I can recall the comfort, the sense of a safety net. The cadences of the mass were important to her, and she says she still has a sense of poems as prayer.

DDM had faith in a kind of spiritual life which included the conviction that there was life after death, but did not subscribe to any formal religion, even though she kept a Catholic missal by her bed and read it regularly.

Brought up both by her teachers and by Katherine Parr in evangelical Protestantism, she developed into a pragmatic Anglican , probably both by conviction and by informed political choice. She exercised her diplomatic skills to avoid being pinned down on divisive details of theology. Though her conformity to Catholicism during her sister's reign was necessary for her survival, her personal faith (even after this danger was over) included elements later thought of as Catholic , like devotion to the symbolic imagery of the cross, as well as the use of colourful oaths. But at some point during her reign she exchanged the cross on the altar in her private Chapel Royal for the Bible.

She is an English feminist who has allowed little information about her family origins to be known. In a lecture given in Spain she said she came from a middle-class background, and in a lecture for the National Secular Society she said that we were Church ofEngland—though they did not go to church on Sunday but spent the time in the compulsory family hobby of sailing. Sent to a RomanCatholic school (though not subjected there to pressure to convert), she was convinced by the age of fourteen that the Catholic faith was the true one: the only question was whether she had the courage to face the family teasing that converting would bring down on her head. As a compromise, she settled for beginning to follow the family religion seriously, receiving confirmation in the Anglican Church and becoming a regular attender at early morning Sunday sung Eucharist. Later, joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament brought her into contact with an articulate young male agnostic, and by the time she reached university she was an agnostic herself. Actual opposition to institutional religion came later, after she became a feminist and learned about the woman-hatred that is embedded in many of the world's major religions.

The new vicar (who did not live in the parish) respected her so highly that he allowed her to appoint a curate (the vicar's substitute) of her own choice, Mr Horne. She was personally sorry when Horne left with his wife in 1792 to go out as chaplain to the settlement in Sierra Leone. Samuel Walter , then appointed curate, showed some unease about the dividing of religious observance in the parish between Anglican and Methodist practices, but MBF 's persuasion brought him round to accepting their de facto unity. Though her Methodist faith remained strong, she was willing to enter dialogue with individuals holding different beliefs: the local Roman Catholic priest and a Deist nephew of her husband.

Antonia converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism at the age of about thirteen, when her mother did. (Her father had already converted in 1940, but she says her parents put no pressure on her.) Being a natural subversive, she said that as a child and young adult she enjoyed being a Catholic and a Labour supporter in a social milieu which was largely Conservative and Church of England. By the early twenty-first century she has become a Catholic moderniser, who says I believe very strongly that the time for women priests has come. . . . maybe one of my 11 granddaughters will be a priest.

HW was received into the Roman Catholic Church under the religious name of Mary Magdalen.

Though confirmed into the Church of Ireland (that is, in the Anglican faith) she sometimes thought (for partly political reasons) of converting to Roman Catholicism . She arranged a second, Catholic christening for her sons.

When Eirene, later Antonia, was seven years old, her father converted to Catholicism —a decision that had a profound effect on her. She too became a Catholic and remained a nominal one all her life, returning actively to the faith when she turned forty. Yet her religion exacerbated her feelings of shame and unworthiness.

MW was influenced in her religious thinking by several writers, including Simone Weil and Graham Greene . The novelist Antonia White stood as godmother to them both, and they seem to have fallen in mostly with broad-minded priests who did not absolutely require that they should abandon their (in the eyes of the Church) non-marriage and live as brother and sister. At Thornworthy they helped the local community raise money (by a lottery, among other things) to build a small Catholic church instead of celebrating Mass in the village hall.