Around 1904 EU developed an interest in Roman Catholicism. This interest, however, aroused in her an almost equal anxiety, on two grounds. For one thing, her spiritual development thus far had largely been self-directed, and she was loathe to sacrifice her intellectual liberty for the sake of becoming a Catholic. Secondly, her fiancé, Hubert , was wary of her converting, chiefly on the grounds that Evelyn's confessor would virtually make a third in their marriage and constitute an alien power with certain rights of possession over her. Nonetheless she decided, in April 1907, that she would convert, but postponed any action until after the wedding. She reversed her decision later that year when the papal decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis were issued. These texts condemned Modernist teaching, a growing trend in Catholicism that tried to reconcile modern scientific and historical knowledge with traditional doctrine. EU 's spiritual thought was largely influenced by Modernist teachings, and she could not commit herself to a Catholicism that excluded them. Nevertheless this year, 1907, was the time from which she dated her conversion to Christianity.

Born into the rising English gentry and into the then nationally practised Roman Catholic faith, she later made choice of the new or reformed religion of Protestantism . (As the Puritan John Field put it much later, God drew her out of the sincke and mier of Poperie.) Her husband said that his wife, although not seyne in Devynnete (that is not a theologian), was halff a Scrypture Woman. Protestantism had an obvious attraction for women who wanted to read and learn for themselves, and to assume responsibility for their relationship with God and their eventual salvation.

As a young girl, KT was a fervent Catholic who aspired to be a nun: the convent glimmered like a pale star before me. Her eldest sister, whom she looked up to but who died when Katharine was still fairly young, had entered a convent.

Although strongly influenced by her Methodist grandfather, FT grew up in the Anglican Church. She remained an Anglican even though she was attracted to the Catholic Church in later life.

She was a Cartesian in philosophy, and an Anglican in religion (though the influence of her Dissenting grandmother caused her an attack of doctrinal panic over predestination at the age of fifteen). She says she resolved, as befitted a disciple of Descartes , to take responsibility for her own religious faith, to be able to say why she was a protestant, not a Quaker or Roman Catholic.

She was a cradle Catholic born into an English gentry family which harboured priests, celebrated the mass in secret, and suffered persecution for their faith. A recent commentator, Dorothy L. Latz , regrets the way that modern criticism has tended to ignore the religious dimension in dealing with such women as WT . Latz reminds readers that Thimelby would not have thought in terms of a career, or self-assertion, but of contemplative [life], spirituality, and . . . love of God.

She remained a Unitarian all her life, but was open-minded enough to enjoy discussing Unitarianism on equal terms with Catholicism, Judaism, and other forms of religious worship with the eccentric Marquess of Bute (himself a Catholic convert from Anglicanism).

She spent her first Christmas as a Catholic with Sheila Kaye-Smith and her husband, T. Penrose Fry , and attended Midnight Mass in the church they had built in their fields, with German prisoners of war adding noticeably to the singing ability of the congregation. She more than once attended retreats at the Cenacle Convent in Hampstead, under the aegis of Ronald Knox .

An accusation was brought against JA of being a Popish recusant convict, that is of practising the outlawed Roman Catholic religion. The charge (which was dismissed) probably had something to do with her ongoing court case.

ES was received into the Roman Catholic Church at Farm Street Church in Mayfair.

Born into the English gentry, ES was until about the age of twenty brought up an earnest heretic: that is to say, a member of the Church of England . Her eldest brother, for whom she kept house for some years, converted to Catholicism in connection with his first marriage. (His wife was later celebrated for her pious, early death.) He was married in 1587 and widowed in 1595. His second wife was a Catholic too, and he died in the bosom of the Church (though in 1618, four years before his death, he denied his religion in an attempt to avoid the civil penalties attached to it). The story goes that Elizabeth resisted for six years any pressure that his faith may have represented, before herself converting to Roman Catholicism on the basis of her own reading. The final spur to her conversion was hearing an old beggar-woman relate a story about the Virgin intervening with a miracle to save a woman in childbirth.

JR was at one time attracted to Catholicism , mostly practised by the black people on the island. There was considerable prejudice against Catholicism, and many horror stories about the nuns circulated amongst the white people on Dominica, so JR was at first very upset by plans for her to attend the convent as a day pupil. However, she grew to love the Mother Superior and enjoyed her lessons. From May to December 1904, when her father took a leave and went with her mother to England, she became a boarder at the convent. She liked the fact that black and white people sat together at church instead of being segregated, as they were at the Anglican church. JR decided to become a Catholic nun, but not to inform her parents until she grew older. After her parents returned, she resumed attendance at the Anglican church with her family. Her interest in Catholicism waned. She tried to do good works as the Anglican minister urged, but concluded that this was a useless pursuit because the Devil was stronger than God. JR later ironically described her religious phase as happy: "I don't think I've ever been quite so happy since."

KR was brought up in her father's Wesleyan Methodist faith, and also introduced to her maternal family's Presbyterianism by her Scottish relatives. She wrote of being drawn more strongly to the Greek myths in her father's library books than to Christianity in her childhood. During the 1940s, and in flight from her love-affair with Alastair MacDonald , she became a temporary convert to Roman Catholicism , although she finally left the Catholic Church. She was much influenced by Jung 's archetypal theories and by the eastern tradition of religious and philosophical thinking.

Although in her student days she practised witchy activities like casting spells, she was, says Marina Warner (the recipient of an unsuccessful spell to cure a painful unrequited love), a quietly practising Catholic most of her adult life.

Since he was born and faithfully remained a Catholic , he was excluded from university, from government jobs, and latterly from residing in London or owning a horse worth more than a certain sum.

She had become seriously interested in Secularism in 1857. Now, after attending the Congress for the Advancement of Social Science in Dublin in 1861, she became interested in the work of the Irish Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Charity . Her conversion to Roman Catholicism was a profound change for her. Her friends Adelaide Procter and Irish feminist Sarah Atkinson were significant influences, and another was her admiration for the active well-ordered charity which she associated with the Catholic Church. She became increasingly devout later in her life.

AG , a fervent Christian believer, seems to have remained in the Church of England , in which she was brought up, but her many printed pleas for religious ecumenism may have been fuelled by the fact that while one of her aunts was an Anglican missionary, others moved away from the Church of England to become respectively a Quaker and a Roman Catholic nun.

It seems her family was tolerant in religious matters. They were Anglicans , but when one of the brothers became both a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit priest, his conversion does not seem to have caused significant friction.

Confirmed as a Roman Catholic as a child, GG at fourteen was into fasting and kneeling in prayer in the church for hours on end, in a fervour which she later identified as sexual. Her faith began to wane very soon after this, though her unauthorised biographer maintains that Catholicism retained great imaginative appeal for her throughout her rebellious student days in Australia. She now terms herself an atheist.

AG 's parents were Irish Protestant land-owners whose estate, encompassing thousands of acres, was originally acquired in the seventeenth century. Her forebears were a mix of Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant. Her maternal grandmother, an O'Grady, belonged to a family that converted to Protestantism in the early eighteenth century, and her father's family, descended from a Church of Ireland clergyman, remained Protestant, though they did not match her mother's Evangelicism. Her maternal grandfather descended from a family of English settlers. AG placed particular value on a French Huguenot great-great-grandmother, Frances Algoin , from whom she inherited a much-loved diamond Maltese cross and a bible.

This turbulent, restless and divided family was also unusual in being of mixed religion. Ann's mother was a Protestant and her father a Catholic . They followed the same system proposed for a mixed marriage in Richardson 's Sir Charles Grandison, by which the girls were brought up as Anglicans and the boys as Catholics. In old age AH was on the most unloving terms imaginable with her neighbours, but wrote as if Christian belief was deeply important to her.

Brought up as an Anglican in the Church of Ireland , she devoted herself with increasing fervour to her religion. Later she converted and became an extremely devout Catholic .

Rose, who was pregnant and soon to give birth when her husband fled into exile, consulted Cranmer , Latimer , and Ridley as to whether it would be betraying her faith to have the child baptised in a Catholic service, for safety. They pronounced that this would not be blameworthy, but she nonetheless substituted sugar for the salt traditionally used in the ceremony, to guard against idolatry. Her next baby, born in Antwerp, was baptised a protestant .

John Hoey was a devout Roman Catholic, and on her marriage FSH converted to Catholicism . Catholicism is not usually an issue in her fiction (with the exception of the anti-divorce novel Out of Court), but critic Peter David Edwards suggests that she certainly wished to propagate her faith.