Culturally Religious

"I wouldn't be a very spiritual man, right. I don't believe in God, right. Still, Catholic. Because there's nothing you can do when you're Catholic. Once you've started Catholic, frankly, there's no real way to stop being Catholic. Even not believing in God isn't regarded as sufficient reason to get out of the Catholic Church."

— Dara Ó Briain

There are many who were raised religious, and — even though their life has moved away from adamantly following their religion's doctrine — are still really concerned with their religion and/or cite it often. This comes up very frequently in any Good Girls Avoid Abortion conversation, as when a female character will suddenly be revealed as a "good Catholic" who just can't do it.

This also pops up a lot with many comedians, directors, and musicians. Even though they may be lapsed, converted to another religion, or are now atheists, religious imagery and topics often still appear in their works. There are also certain N-Word Privileges: a comedian who tells you they were raised religious is probably going to make a lot of religious jokes or observations about their faith, which might be deemed more offensive if it came from someone else. And if you were trying to be offensive, you'd want to offend something you've known and experienced all the reasons to dislike it the most.

For whatever reason — perhaps because Christianity is Catholic — this is particularly common for those who were raised Catholic, and there seems to be no common Protestant equivalent to this trope, even though people paying lip service to their family or culture's religion is as old as religion itself. One possible explanation for this is that Catholicism, much more than Protestantism, is considered by some to be a part of one's ethnic and cultural identity in addition to being a religion, especially for those whose national heritage is tied to the Church (such as people of Irish, Italian, Polish, Hispanic, or Filipino descent); Informed Judaism pretty much works this way, as well. Another possibility is that compared to Protestantism, the Catholic Church places a somewhat stronger emphasis on iconography and ritual; this can then become a rich source of material for former Catholic authors who may no longer remember the subtler doctrinal aspects of Catholicism, or who also may require an easy cue for their non-Catholic audiences to recognize. The third probable answer is the fact that it used to be rather difficult to formally abandon membership in the Catholic Church, and since 2010, it's impossible, which means that the Church still considers practically all lapsed Catholics as members of its flock whether they like it or not. (That baptism leaves quite the indelible mark on the soul...)

Yet this trope is by no means unique to Catholicism. There are Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, LDS, Jehovah's Witness, Jewish, and even Pentecostal and Baptist equivalents of this trope. This is especially common in Russian works, where the Orthodox Church is an institution and has a huge influence on the culture, but is largely seen a means to an end (usually for marriage) and otherwise does not greatly impact individuals' personal lives. In much of Northern Europe, this applies to Finns, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes who are registered as members of their national Lutheran Churches, even though many rarely attend. The same largely applies to the English^note To a degree also to the Welsh, while Scots are a little more religiously diverse, being split between Catholicism and multiple related varieties of Protestantism, who might causally refer to their church as "COE" (the Anglican Church Of England)

There are various shadings of this. A "Sunday Catholic" is someone who attends Mass regularly, and may or may not follow Church doctrine closely; a "Christmas and Easter Catholic" is someone who attends Mass only on those holidays (and maybe such events as weddings and funerals), again regardless of how closely they hold to Church doctrine; a "cafeteria Catholic" is a usually derisive term for someone who chooses which of the Church's teachings to follow or ignore; an "ex-Catholic" or "recovering Catholic" has left the Church, may or may not self-identify or have formally converted to another religion, but still has the cultural baggage of having been raised Catholic; a "cultural Catholic" or "non-practicing Catholic" still identifies as Catholic due to family or ethnic heritage but really doesn't adhere to the religion itself; and a "lapsed Catholic" or "fallen-away Catholic" is the Catholic Church's own term for all of the above, except perhaps the "Sunday Catholic" (depending on how much they hew to Church doctrine and how much any differences can be justified as legitimate theological argument—which is, truth be told, rather a lot).

Compare and contrast Ambiguously Christian. See also Ambivalent Anglican. These characters (and creators) commonly invoke Love Is Like Religion.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• Huntress, aka Helena Bertinelli, of the Batman family and Birds of Prey, doesn't bring it up often, but she wears cross jewelry and prays before she fights Lady Shiva, possibly to the death. Her faith has varied in strength over the years, from non-existent (an important plot point in one story) to firm (but never devout). The strength of her faith is used as a symbol of how much hope and optimism she has for the future. In bad times, her faith declines. For example, after causing the death of a mob boss who knew her identity, she throws away her cross. In good times, her faith is stronger. For example, she plans on attending Mass after getting her teaching job and feeling accepted by the Birds of Prey.
• Runaways: Nico Minoru has a strange relationship with her Catholicism: she seems to look back on it fondly, but the fact that her parents were trying to raise her to be a good Catholic while being terrible criminals unnerves her. She used to be an altar girl. Her family has been Catholic since at least the 1900's, when her ancestor Witchbreaker hunted "sinners" alongside the Adjudicator and Black Maria. She's functionally non-religious, but turns back to her faith for comfort and security, something she bonds over with Victor.

Fan Works

• Nimbus Llewelyn is possibly excessively British and when asked about religion - in relation to God in his works - observes that he's "vaguely agnostic in the fine tradition of the Church of England."
• Tim Drake and his late father Jack both fall into this category in Angel of the Bat, though Tim eventually finds much of his faith again. Though she wasn't raised with the faith, by the end Cassandra is a deeply spiritual cafeteria Catholic mostly as a result of her pansexuality and the girl she starts dating. Even the author, who calls himself a deeply religious man, is also a big proponent of God Before Dogma.
• Ultra Fast Pony. In the episode "Faith to Faith":
  Applejack: "Faithless heathen"? Screw you, I'll have you know I'm Catholic!
  Twilight: Wait a minute. You're a Catholic?
  Applejack: Yeah...
  Twilight: But you don't believe in God.
  Applejack: Of course I don't! I'm Catholic!

Films — Live-Action

• In Dogma, in the beginning, Bethany doesn't believe in God and works at an abortion clinic, but still goes to Mass every Sunday.
• Four Lions: Omar, the guy who gathers his friends together into a Muslim terrorist cell. He cares very much about his Muslim identity, which is why he's forming the terrorist cell, but in reality he basically lives life like an assimilated British person, treating his wife as an equal and wearing Western clothing.
• Jennifer's Body: Needy appears to be nominally Catholic since her mom crosses herself after talking about Jesus' crucifixion; later, she calls on God along with a couple of saints while fighting Jennifer.
• The John Wick franchise uses lots of Christian imagery and terminology, such as Continental grounds considered consecrated and those who fall foul of the rules declared excommunicado. However, none of the characters express any real belief and discuss the afterlife as something that may or may not exist rather than definite.

Literature

• This is perhaps the most important theme in Brideshead Revisited; Catholicism has left an indelible mark on the souls of the errant Flytes (Lord Marchmain, Sebastian, and Julia), and all of them are eventually and almost inevitably reconciled with the Church.
• Cut and Run's Nick O'Flaherty is Irish Catholic. He makes no mention of going to church and isn't really shown praying, but he's apparently practicing enough to stop dead in the middle of an armed chase scene after running by a church and realizing he might be about to kill people on Easter Sunday. He makes sure to cross himself before his friends pull him back to the chase.
  Nick: I'm going to Hell anyway, I don't know why I bother anymore.
• The Dracula Tape, Dracula is revealed to be actually a Traditionalist Catholic as religious artifacts don't have an effect on him, but he admits not being practicing anymore at the time he tells his side of the story. Still, he takes great offense at seeing communion wafers weaponized by Van Helsing and delightfully deconstructs how he got them wrong.
• In the Emberverse, Juniper MacKenzie was raised Catholic, and other characters observe that, despite having converted to Wicca, she still seems to be carrying her Catholic Guilt.
• Good Omens parodies this with the Satanic conspiracy working to bring about armageddon. Unlike the sort of self-proclaimed Satanists that you occasionally hear about on the news (described by Crowley as random mortal psychos who give even demons the creeps), rank-and-file members of the Ancient Conspiracy treat the Black Mass the same way that less devout Christians treat church: just a cultural tradition that you participate in once a week and then forget about the rest of the time. Even the nuns running the hospital where The Antichrist is delivered seem Affably Evil—all the better to present themselves as normal nuns to the American diplomat whose baby they plan to swap with the Antichrist (not to mention the local couple whose kid is accidentally replaced with the Antichrist instead).
• Jean Floressas des Esseintes from A Rebours is a French aristocrat who moves off to a house in the countryside; he had a Catholic upbringing and was instructed by the Jesuits. At some point, he abandoned the faith and turned to the philosophical ideas of the German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. In spite of this, des Esseintes still owns some Latin works by the early Catholic authors, and he could not help but connect Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook with the resignation from the Imitation of Christ. At the end of the novel, he accepts that he has to go back to Paris (as his doctors told him), and he ultimately resigns himself to God.
• In the Stephanie Plum series, both Stephanie and her sister Valerie mention still having guilt instilled by a Catholic upbringing, even though neither actively practices the faith.
• These Words Are True and Faithful: Ernie identifies as a Catholic but does not observe that faith or even know anything about it beyond what he half-remembers from CCD.
• Cole St. Clair in Wolves of Mercy Falls Series is heavily implied to be this, without the title "Catholic" ever being used. He is seen holding a rosary, "Fingers grasping the beads as if the gesture was familiar" and later, an interviewer questions his belief in God, quoting Cole's former role as a choir boy. Given that Cole is now a Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll poster child, he is very much the lapsed sort.
• The Brentford Trilogy features Irish John Omally, who is, in his own words "... a Catholic. Not a good one, but a Catholic, nonetheless." While he seems to have little attachment to the faith in his everyday life and readily admits that the Church's answers to the great questions only raised more questions for him, he does occasionally seek out father Moity for spiritual advice and is willing to risk his life to defend the Church against the depravations of a demonic reincarnation of Alexander Borgia.
• Household Gods: Nicole was raised a Catholic. Though she's lapsed, the contempt Roman pagans have toward Christians even so strikes hard given her background.

Live-Action TV

• Game of Thrones: Davos starts out as an atheist, but still instinctively invokes the Seven while seeing something as shocking as Melisandre getting heavily pregnant within days and giving birth to a shadow monster. He later comes to believe in her powers because of this (though he's still no fan of her god).
• Played for comedy with Mac in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, who only remembers his Catholic faith when he wants to complain or to criticize other people. In one episode Charlie and Mac are both okay with pre-marital sex and abortion but refuse to use birth control because "we went to Catholic school."
• The Goldbergs aren't exactly observant Jews - they have a seriously not-kosher diet involving seafood, pork and dairy sauce, often together - but have bar-mitzvahs, respect festivals like Channukah, and where weddings happen, they are in synagogues or with a Rabbi in attendance, under the canopy. Otherwise, religion doesn't figure. Grandfather Pop-Pops has complained in a restaurant about his family eating traife food, and in public insisted on his right to a kashrut choice. He has also protested about the Goldbergs celebrating Christmas in everything except name. Otherwise he has simply not bothered.
• On House:
  • Chase was raised Catholic, and in the Season 1 episode "Damned If You Do" it is revealed that he attended seminary before becoming a doctor. It's always interesting when the episode has nuns in it or otherwise mentions religion and God. He zigzags from one end of the belief/skepticism spectrum to the other throughout the series. One season 8 episode sees him fall in love with a novice nun patient and try to lure her away from the Church. His efforts actually get a What the Hell, Hero? from House himself.
  • House tries to make things difficult at dinner with Cuddy and her mother by telling her mother he's an Atheist, (because his not being Jewish didn't do it). She's unfazed and tells him that half the Jewish people she knows are Atheists.
• The A-Team has Templeton Peck, who was raised in Catholic orphanages. Most certainly falls into either the lapsed or recovering groups, as he had no qualms with impersonating a priest if the con asks it of him.
• Jack Killian from Midnight Caller is a lifelong Catholic, although he isn't very devout.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm occasionally has Larry, a firmly secular Jew, experience a culture clash with friends and relatives who actually practice. In one episode, he has a conversation with an man who keeps peppering his speech with Yiddish, prompting an annoyed Larry to start responding in gibberish. In another episode, an Orthodox houseguest grills him on where his milchig plates are, to the utter confusion of his Shiksa Goddess wife.
• The Wire
  • When union boss Frank Sobotka and Police commissioner Stan Valchek butt heads over whose stained glass window will be added to the new Nave of the church, but it's implied neither man attends mass. Jimmy McNulty also is very ambiguously Catholic whose faith only seems to rear its head when he spurns Bushmills as Protestant whiskey.
  • The drug game of Baltimore also has shades of this in the "Sunday Truce" it respects for the sabbath. Avon and Slim Charles are not churchgoing men either, but both are appalled that Stringer Bell lets two gunmen violate the truce by shooting at Omar and his mother as they attend church.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer has Caleb, a serial killer who used to be a priest. He now serves the First Evil as The Dragon but still wears the clothes of a priest because he "can't turn his back on where he comes from." He also condemns secular public schools and says misogynistic things.
• The Looming Tower: O'Neill is a lapsed Catholic but one of his girlfriends is devout and the weight of his sins is very heavy on his shoulders. He cares enough about it that rather than just divorce his wife (which could result in his excommunication), O'Neill pursues an annulment, but it doesn't work.

Radio

• In one episode of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, Finnemore describes himself as having some version of this, which is precisely why he's more comfortable making jokes about Christianity than Islam:
  John: I mean, you know the way people are always saying, you know, "they're sorry but this is a Christian country?"
  Margaret: Yes, and if you're going to say it's not, just because...
  John: No, no, I think it is. I think they're right. I mean, it's a country in which people practice a lot of religions and none, but its history, its literature, its culture are all bound up in Christianity, and most importantly 70% of the population still tick Christianity on the census form. I think it is a Christian country and I grew up in it. I've read the Bible, I've been to church. I have a connection with those stories, even if I don't believe in them. Whereas I've never read the Koran or been to a mosque. I don't know what a funny imam sounds like!

Stand-Up Comedy

• David Cross jokes in one of his comedy specials that despite being an atheist, Judaism still considers him to be a Jew due to his lineage. He acts out a conversation in which he affirms his atheism only to asked, "But was your mother's vagina Jewish?"
• Dylan Moran has a lot of jokes about catholic guilt that he holds on to despite being an Atheist.

Web Animation

• Raimi from Broken Saints has a lot of snark reserved for supposedly supernatural practices and is far from reverent in his inner monologue, but still has a crucifix on his wall at home and carries some Catholic guilt.

Web Comics

• John, an Author Avatar and main character in The Word Weary, makes the sign of the cross when he hears a siren and has an icon of the Virgin Mary in his room, but seems to be a lapsed Catholic.
• Brian, Rowan, and the rest of the Fitzpatrick siblings from Rhapsodies. Neither appears to practice, but they still use the Virgin Mary's name in vain and get dragged to confession by their mom.

Web Original

• While Brad Jones considers himself an agnostic, it's mentioned in his reviews that he attended Sunday School and has Christian friends. This is especially evident in his DVD-R Hell skewering of Rock: It's Your Decision and Deception of a Generation.
• The late programmer and TempleOS creator Terry A. Davis grew up in a Catholic household and became an atheist until he had a "revelation" from God that ordered him to build the Third Temple of Jerusalem in software format and became a born-again Christian of an unclear denomination. Though he expressed disdain for Catholicism (especially towards the Pope and the Irish) he admitted in an infamous TempleOS blog post that at some point in his life he fantasized about leading an "Catholic army" like in Dune composed of Mexicans and Brazilians (both belong to Catholic-majority countries).

Real Life

• Kevin Smith, who makes foul movies filled with all sorts of cussing and donkey shows, is still obviously obsessed with his Catholic upbringing. And made the movie Dogma. However, he goes to Mass only before commencing the filming of a movie, and before the premiere. He's also pretty open about being a "Cafeteria Catholic."
• Martin Sheen has been quoted thus: “I'm one of those cliff-hanging Catholics. I don't believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.” He became a believer again after reading The Brothers Karamazov, which was given to him by Terrence Malick.
• Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie once described himself as "this indoctrinated Catholic even though I haven't been to church of my own volition in 10 or 15 years now."
• Modern Spaniards tend to be profoundly anti-religion as a side effect of the Church-sponsored Franco dictatorship, but they surely love their religious tradition and art, and many explicitly identify as Catholics even if in their everyday life they barely remember that God and the Church are even things. Those people often fall in the "non-practicing Catholic" pool (which doubles the size of the practising population in surveys), which is variously filled with agnostics, deists, Jesuists and Christian atheists who consider themselves Catholic either by cultural reasons or for not having a strong grasp of all those terms.
  • Luis Buñuel. Even though he was obviously anticlerical, it's impossible to point out one of his films that doesn't include a reference to Catholicism.
  • Antonio Banderas is openly agnostic (he still identifies as such, although he has recently implied to have become a sort of deist), yet he is part of a brotherhood of the Spanish Holy Week because he loves the whole Passion rhing, and also played a Catholic priest in The Body.
• One can argue that the Balkans have taken this trope and run with it. with the exception of Alabania, most people of the Balkans still associate their culture with their religion making it very hard to shake it off even if they are not religious themselves. Like the Spanish above the love their imagery and traditions with many taking part on the easter games and traditions that have come out of the religion.
• Guillermo del Toro is an atheist who was also raised Catholic and uses a lot of Catholic imagery.
• Edmund McMillen, the creator of The Binding of Isaac, was raised around Catholics and once compared the faith to Dungeons & Dragons. He cites Catholicism's morbid and violent imagery as influential on Isaac's development. In the game, there are many homages to Catholic teaching, such as the Seven Deadly Sins Isaac must defeat, the Rosary, the Bible, and even the Wafer.
• A poll from a religious magazine directed at Catholics in France concluded that 48% of the Catholics do not believe in God. In contrast to Ireland, France enjoys the world's most ironclad separation of church and state so getting your kids into school isn't an issue. This is purely a matter of belief and self-identification.
• Madonna was raised Catholic, and a lot of her songs, music videos, and albums (particularly from The '80s) allude to this. She once stated: "Once you're a Catholic, you're always a Catholic—in terms of your feelings of guilt and remorse and whether you've sinned or not."
• Lady Gaga was also raised Catholic and even attended an all-girls Catholic school as a kid. Her video for the song "Alejandro" features strong Catholic imagery.
• Martin Scorsese said "I'm a lapsed Catholic. But I am Roman Catholic - there's no way out of it." His films often deal with Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption. It's been suggested that his 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which offended many in the Catholic Church (and many other churches besides) can be chalked up to a vague sense of self-loathing or alienation on Scorsese's part.
  • Scorsese also considers himself ‘lapsed’ in part due to his divorces, once studied to become a priest, and still considers Catholic theology and faith a major part of his life and work, and wanted to make the film Silence for years.
• Joe Rogan, who references his Catholic School education and Catholic upbringing despite being an atheist.
• Denis Leary goes so far as to found the Lapsed Catholic Church at the end of his second album, Lock'N'Load. He also admits that he couldn't remember the Hail Mary prayer during a scene when his character in Rescue Me has to recite it, but can name the starting lineup of the 1967 Red Sox off the top of his head.
  "And that's sad."
• Brazil, like Ireland, is a predominantly Catholic country. Brazilian Catholics are non-practicing majority Catholics. The same can be, and is—probably with varying degrees of accuracy—said about most majority-Catholic countries.
• Dan Savage is openly atheist and a supporter of the skeptical movement but considers himself "culturally Catholic" because he was raised that way and respected his parents' beliefs. He tends to bring this up when religious conservatives accuse him of being "anti-Christian."
• Camille Paglia. While she currently identifies as an atheist, she has credited her upbringing in the Roman Catholic church as highly influential to her interest in paganism and its themes in art and culture.
• Jeremy Irons, who coincidentally played the ruthless Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) on The Borgias is by no means practicing, but does cite his local parish as somewhat of an influence in his philosophy on caring for others.
• Anthony Burgess was raised by Catholic parents in Manchester, England. He had a heavily religious education in Catholic schools and, though he lapsed from his faith in his adult life, his works are consistent with a Catholic perspective and worldview on various subject matters such as the concept of free will in A Clockwork Orange.
• A few people from Rooster Teeth cite themselves as this, though most notably Burnie Burns and Michael Jones. The former's dad was a priest at one point before retiring, and while Burnie doesn't seem much of a believer now he admits he would struggle to get rid of a Bible. The latter was raised Catholic by his parents and said that he doesn't follow it in adult life.
• Quebec, Canada, is another example of this trope. From the conquest of New France by the British until the 1960s, the dominant political and social power was the Catholic Church. Then, in the 1960s there was the Quiet Revolution, wherein hospitals and schools became government-run instead of Church-run (though nuns and priests still tour the hospitals on Sunday to offer the Host. Also, schools taught Catholicism until the last decade, though you could opt out very easily.), and the Church was demonized into a totalitarian, reactionary relic of a bygone age. Still, the majority of Quebecers, even those born after the 1960s, are baptized and know the basics of the religion. Oh, and whenever a Quebecer swears, they sound like they're listing off items from a church.
• Edward Elgar was an English composer who was also brought up as a Catholic. He was sympathetic to English Catholics suffering prejudice in Protestant Britain and he composed a couple of religious choral works, like The Dream of Gerontius, The Kingdom, The Apostles, and The Light of Life. However, he was not particularly devout and was ambivalent towards the Catholic faith, especially towards the end of his life. He continued going to Mass because his wife Alice, a devout Catholic convert from Anglicanism, encouraged him to or because he admired a particular priest in a parish. He also denied that there is an afterlife, despite the irony of The Dream of Gerontius being about life after death.
• Romantic composer Hector Berlioz was also raised Catholic and gained his love of music from the Church. After seven years, his religious fervour eventually died down and he became an agnostic for the rest of his life. However, he was not hostile to the Church and fondly recalled his childhood years. The influence of religious music remained with him throughout his life and he went on to compose a Requiem, a Te Deum, and L'enfance du Christ, an oratorio on the childhood of Jesus.
• The Dutch provinces of Limburg and North Brabant are distinctly Catholic, and have traditions like Carnival and lighting votive candles, which stands in contrast to most of the culturally Protestant Netherlands. Despite this, very few Dutch Catholics actually believe their religion.
• Roger Ebert considered himself to be a Catholic and was even friends with a priest (and former Sun-Times writer) named Fr. O'Leary, even though he was an agnostic. His colleague Richard Roeper is Catholic, but according to his own words, "not always first in line for Sunday Mass."
• In his early adulthood, Frank Capra described himself as a "Christmas Catholic". It eventually became subverted when in later years, through the influence of his wife, Lucille Reyburn, Capra returned to the Church. After that, he described himself as "a Catholic in spirit; one who firmly believes that the anti-moral, the intellectual bigots, and the Mafias of ill will may destroy religion, but they will never conquer the cross."
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was raised a Russian Orthodox Christian, but he was not particularly devout, having written to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck: "As you can see, I am still bound to the Church by strong ties, but on the other hand I have long ceased to believe in the dogma." He was, however, profoundly attached to the Orthodox Church's rituals and music and wrote a liturgical composition based on the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, a Eucharistic service in the Eastern Christian Church.
• Unrelentingly attacked by Søren Kierkegaard, who saw his entire literary career as a mission to "introduce Christianity into Christendom". His problem with "Christendom" (his term for culturally religious Christians as a whole) is that it produces people who have all the trappings of the Christian faith, but with little, if anything, that shows a genuine devotional spirit.
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti (the brother of Christina Rossetti) was a poet, painter, and founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was brought up an Anglican, and the Oxford Movement within the Church of England instilled in him a strong Anglican sensibility. However, according to his brother William Michael Rossetti, Dante was not particularly devout and only went to church, and even then, when so inclined.
• John Ruskin was a writer and polymath known for his art and social criticism. Under his mother's guidance, he was brought up as an evangelical Christian and committed large portions of the Bible to memory. Ruskin's evangelical upbringing had a profound and lasting impact on his writing, even after his "unconversion" during a visit to Turin, though he did return to Christianity some years later.
• Charles Peguy, a French poet, essayist, and editor, is an interesting example. He grew up Catholic but spent some years professing an unsteady atheism. In 1908 at the latest, Péguy reverted to the Catholic faith and remained a fervent, albeit generally non-practicing, Catholic. This is because he married into a family of nonbelievers in 1897, back when he was an atheist. As he married outside the Church, the Church did not deem his marriage valid. In addition, his wife, Charlotte-Françoise Baudoin, refused to have her children baptized. For these reasons, Péguy found it impossible to live as a Catholic and did not go to Mass. That said, the Catholic faith was a central element in his essays and poetry.
• Comedian Mike Birbiglia. In one of his bits, he says you can always tell people who went to Catholic school because they're atheists.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who was baptized and brought up in the Catholic faith. He lost his faith during his early school days, but it never stopped his fascination with the Catholic faith, and it influenced his philosophical ideas. Wittgenstein himself said to a friend: "I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view".
• Charles Maurras, one of the central figures of the Christian monarchist movement Action Française, was raised a Catholic, but he lost his faith at some point in his youth and became an agnostic for most of his life. He remained anti-secularist and was politically supportive of the Church, but his own religious views were less than orthodox (Maurras distrusted the Gospels for instance, stating that they were written "by four obscure Jews", and praised the Church for supposedly covering up its "dangerous teachings"; this was met with very fierce criticism from the Church). In his final days, however, Maurras reverted to the Catholic faith and received the last rites.
• Joseph Conrad was born to a devout Catholic family and baptized in that faith at the parish church in Zhitomir, but he was not a practicing Catholic for much of his life. However, he never repudiated his faith, even declining membership to a London club because one of its requirements was that he become a Protestant. His son, John Conrad, stated that his father, after he finished explaining why he felt no need to do the sign of the cross upon entering a church, added a qualifier: "Don't assume that because I do not go to church that I do not believe, I do; all true seamen do in their hearts."
• Tom Baker spent his late teens as a novice brother for the Brothers of Christian Instruction, but he left the monastery after losing his faith. Even though he lost his faith, he has remained obsessed with religion ever since and is notorious for banging on about it in interviews no matter what the interviewer is trying to ask him. Sufficiently symbolically sensitive viewers may notice the Catholic imagery and Messianic Archetype symbolism he incorporated into that character for which he is most famous.
• James Joyce's religious views are complicated. He was brought up a Catholic and educated by Jesuits at Belvedere College, but this was largely due to his mother's influence. His father was a Republican who supported Parnell (the Protestant politician who came very close to uniting the divide between Protestants and Catholics), and Joyce himself harbored those same sympathies. On the one hand, he lost his faith as a young man, dramatized his break from the Church in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ("non serviam"), and generally used Catholic rituals and concepts in a very flippant, irreverent manner; his wife Nora even honored his intentions of declining a religious service for Joyce's burial. On the other hand, some critics suggested that Joyce never fully left the Church, stating how Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are works of Catholic sensibility. In addition, an interview with Eileen Joyce Schaurek, his sister, suggested that James Joyce's apostasy was merely an act to shock people and to cover up what he really was like. Whatever his religious views are, Joyce was still drawn to the Church's aesthetics, and the Catholic faith deeply influenced his works.
• My Chemical Romance — all four of the core members^note Frank Iero, Ray Toro, and Gerard & Mikey Way were raised Catholic, and it shows, both in their lyrics and aesthetic choices; see the band's page for a non-exhaustive list of example lyrics. It also shows (if less prominently) in their post-My Chem solo careers.
• Patrick Stump, lead singer of Fall Out Boy. He describes himself as "somewhere between a post-Catholic and a Taoist". Although his mother left the religion, he says "it still has an influence."
• There's an apocryphal story about a (Catholic) seminar student who went to his mentor saying he no longer believed in God. The mentor responded to him with compassion and understanding and led him back to faith after a period of study and reflection. The student later went to his mentor saying he no longer believed in the authority of the Pope; he was told he would have to regain his belief by the afternoon or be expelled from his studies.
• Quite a few Jewish entertainers who invoke their Jewish upbringing and cultural identity in their work, such as Woody Allen, Larry David and Alain Chabat, are not actually religious.
• Sylvester Stallone was raised devoutly Catholic and went back and forth in his career between being in and out of the church. He isn’t Catholic specifically anymore, but remains a believer in spirituality.

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