My mother was brought up in the Church of England in a ‘High Church’ parish - in fact, her mother, my Granny, described herself as an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ and I think I would not have become a Catholic except for her being such a loving & devout person and the experience of the Anglican Services I went to with her - so beautiful & mystical.
Later, however, my mother went through various unbelieving patches, then went back to church, and in old age she became a Catholic - I was by then a convert of 24 years standing.
My father started out in a ‘Low Church Protestant’ sect, The Apostolic Church, in Scotland. He was devout in his teens, used to preach in the streets, and then he became a socialist atheist, after he joined the army in the Second World War and under the influence of my mother, who’d lost her faith for the time. He retained his special bias against Catholics, however. He died suddenly in his late forties but I hope he had the chance of divine Mercy as only a few days before he died he was talking of wishing that he could be a Christian again.
I was brought up to think of Catholics as strange & barbaric but I always had a secret attraction, and it was meeting Catholics at a university-run retreat that attracted me to their faith.