From The London Guardian-
When I was made the paper's religious affairs correspondent by the editor in early 2000, on my return from a five year posting as the paper's European affairs editor in Brussels, I accepted the job reluctantly, as a demotion.
Stupidly, I could not see the job as much of a story for a paper like the Guardian. I retained vestiges of my religious upbringing, as a Roman Catholic, but for various reasons, I had become largely unobservant – unlike my wife, a charismatic evangelical Anglican, and my children, being brought up in the evangelical tradition in defiance of Catholic teaching, because my wife is more devout than I am.
I am the son and grandson of mixed marriages and could remember my father going off to his church services in the local parish church (and yet still being a good man) while my mother dragged me and my brother and sister off to mass, where we could pray for the conversion of our "separated brethren", such as my dad and the reconversion of England, which was clearly what God and the Virgin Mary, who saw the country as her dowry, would want.
The sense of a separate, slightly beleaguered and isolated identity was even a little thrilling back in the late 1960s, especially as I was taken out of prayers at my (Anglican) grammar school for a period until the notion of contamination by heresy came to seem too absurd and I fell in with all the rest.
Even our church services were virtually identical, as my father pointed out when he attended mass occasionally. My mother though was markedly less keen about attending Anglican services and after she died when I was 28, my faith started dying too. My resentment about the Catholic church's authoritarianism grew and my attendance dropped off.
The church didn't seem to have much to say about why a good woman like my mother should die a long, lingering, horrible death from cancer, or why it should subsequently hound into outer darkness the able and deeply caring parish priest, who had ministered devotedly to her, because he wanted to get married, to a former nun, as it happened.
More here-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/aug/19/religion-catholic-agnostic
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