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.

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.

He grew up surrounded by casual English and Ulster Protestant prejudice against Catholics , and was accustomed to being regarded as a second-class citizen. Though some commentators presented Heaney as no longer a believer, he himself wrote: I think I am a Christian because the Sermon on the Mount satisfies so much in me that pines consciously and unconsciously for appeasement. But I have no doubt that I am also a pagan, and that every poet is: the poet will have to be standing with Oisin against Patrick.

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.

GJ at this time began to question her religious faith; she apparently sought the counsel of a Catholic priest, but found it unsatisfying. Having read an essay by Thomas Carlyle during the Christmas season of 1839, she wrote to him seeking answers to her questions about the meaning of life. At various points in her life GJ 's sense of spiritual crisis and her critical perspective on the Church of England resurfaced, often finding their way into her writing. For example, her critique of organized religion in her novel Zoe reflects her interest in the Oxford Movement.

Julian of Norwich was a Roman Catholic (like everyone in England at the time). It is not known when she became an anchoress, or what her life had been before that. Her family may have owned some property. She may have been a Benedictine nun. But she did not hesitate to criticise the church hierarchy.

She was, like the whole population of England in her day, a Roman Catholic ; she was suspected, but acquitted, of the heresy of Lollardy . After a prolific married life, she became a celibate.

While ML never converted to Anglicanism, by marrying in an Anglican church she distanced herself from Catholicism. She nevertheless remained a self-identified Roman Catholic (albeit a nonpractising one) until her death.

Born English, with a successful professional father who had risen socially by his own efforts, baptised as an Anglican , PL became in maturity an Anglican agnostic. He was an unbeliever, yet both knowledgeable about and respectful of church matters. In short, the Church of England was part of his middle-class heritage Around the time of his father's death he not only read the Bible but actually took private instruction in religion, and later he took steps to remedy Maeve Brennan 's ignorance (as a pre-reform Catholic) of the content of scripture. He was an occasional church-goer and (according to Brennan) in spiritual terms a seeker, unable finally to reject Christianity despite vigorous attempts to do so.

ML was a Roman Catholic . In Massachusetts religious observance was a relaxed affair. An altar was set up for Mass every Saturday night in the local movie house after the films were over, and if the priest was away then his congregation had full permission to attend the Polish church or even the Greek Orthodox church. In Ireland, by contrast, religion was all-consuming. Not just Mass, but many other services and ceremonies were observed. Young Mary became fascinated, and took to playing her solitary games in the church and the churchyard. She got into trouble for picking out the paintbrush hairs that had stuck in the whitewash on the church walls, which one of her aunts classified as the serious sin of stealing from God's house. She discovered there was a very dark side to religious belief, and as she grew older suffered very, very deeply from scruples, from worries about imagined sins. She came through it, however, with a strong sense of the power and beauty of private conscience, and said she found it hard to understand those Irish writers who claimed to have had their lives destroyed by scruples, especially about sex: I find it hard to understand that they were so brittle.

MBL was born into the Roman CatholicChurch (to which her mother had converted and of which her brother later became a champion), and she remained a devout Catholic until her death, to the bafflement of some of her English friends. Nevertheless, she took an interest in Spiritualism and often relates first-hand stories of supernatural experiences.

Missionary work was central to the school's programme, grounded in Evangelical Protestantism, envisioned as a counter to the Catholic nursing sisterhoods.

Though her father was a truculent rationalist and her mother was elusive and vague about her religious beliefs, NM as a schoolgirl was roused to a fervour of devotion by the aesthetic, expressive rituals and the firmly established beliefs and practices of the Anglo-Catholic branch of the Church of England , introduced at the Church of St Michael and all Angels by the Rev. Harry Darwin Burton , whose daughters became her close friends. Burton's introduction of increased ornament and ritual in services was causing upset and protest among some members of the congregation, who found such things as vestments and prostrations theatrical.NM was a sceptic by the 1950s, and by the end of her life had ceased to find any value in religious belief.

She was born into the white American middle class. One of her grandparents was Jewish. The Catholic girlhood which she later wrote about was inflicted on her by her devout maternal grandparents.

Her friend Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary this month: It is said that Hope has become a Roman Catholic on the sly.

Baptised and brought up a Catholic , DM took her Confirmation, First Confession, and First Communion with deep seriousness. She later suspected that she took her first step away from orthodox religion when various pennies began to drop and for the first time she understood the sectarian hatreds among which she lived. She felt that her mother's serious reply to her questions on this occasion constituted a formative licence not to conform. She had a year or so of religious fervour during her teens, which ended when she began to learn about other religions, particularly from a Sikh pen-friend. She lost her faith without guilt or bitterness.

EN was exposed to a range of Christian faiths. Though her mother was Episcopalian , the family attended a Presbyterian kirk (the Church of Scotland) for a time during Elma's early childhood. One of her governesses was strictly Low Church, and in adolescence Elma attended a Catholic convent for one year. Although she experienced many different denominations, she never fully accepted any one of them, because, she says, I did not care which was true. She does say that of all the faiths she was introduced to, she liked Catholicism the best, but not enough to do anything about it.

FN 's christening in the Church of England is listed as having taken place at Old St Pancras Church in London on 24 January 1843. If there is no mistake in this record, her being baptised at twenty-two, shortly before her marriage, suggests that her parents must have been Dissenters or just possibly Roman Catholics or agnostics) while her husband was an Anglican .

She underwent this change in religious beliefs after her visits to America, where she decided: if revelation is true, Truth lies with the Catholics. Catholic worship in their churches is so intense, so devotional—it makes the spiritual exercises of Protestant congregations seem hardly worship at all.

She is often critical, personally and professionally, of the influence of the Catholic Church over the Irish people. During her childhood, she has said, almost everything seemed to be a sin, and all these sins produced a furtive desire, a wild and overfertile fantasy life. So I railed against my religion as I grew up.