No research, just me:

I spent some time in central america (Guatemala and El Salvador) and I observed that what the common Catholic person there gets is fear (females) and a guilt that leads to alcoholism (males).  The both get a massive, continuous dose of mindfuck¹ that it seems makes it nearly impossible to analyze ones surroundings (horrible poverty, terrorism, and cheap death) with even the most rudimentary tools of a healthy psyche.

Almost as overly simplified in my mind is the ease with which one can (or, er, could) manipulate a catholic high school girl in the US.  I always kind of looked at it as just desserts for someone willing to join a club that posts their (the new female member's) second-class status in big brass letters over the door.  Yeah, not very kind, I apologize ... a little.

These formative experiences for me kept Catholicism categorized with other "Simple dumb facts about humans and the powerful who control them." and delineated a few areas to avoid on the life map.  I, growing up in north america and apparently not reading enough, saw and see the Catholic experience as mean.

So now I have this Ph.D, Catholic professor of rhetoric and philosophy super smart girlfriend from Spain, full of love and compassion and well-read from Aristotle on down the chain who seems to live, along with her often even more flamboyant spanish Catholic cohort, about all the parts of life (leave it at that - I can't get her in trouble, OK?) that most all others with access to the world get into at one time or another.  Easy to say she's simply a hypocrite, and that she was raised a Catholic and just doesn't practice.

That doesn't work here I think.  OK, easy to say I have a thing for her and don't want you calling her a hypocrite.  Well, she is a hypocrite.  But she chose this appellation at least a decade after dropping it, she's not rich or famous (IOW not a candidate for Tom Monaghan (founder of Domino's pizza) Disease)², and she's not that old.  We aren't completely language-barrier free, but I get the sense that this is a philosophical decision.  She sees being religious as being human - as being a necessary part of the successful functioning of the human brain.  The most obvious big new thing for me about her faith is the absence of fear.  I contrast this with my previously mentioned experience, which is pretty much absent of everything but fear.

Easy to say she is skipping post-modernism.  Well she will be the first to agree.  I guess I have to go look at that next.  I don't have much suspicion that my own atheism will stumble (gratuitous religious worship verb), but I expect to learn from her not simple, not automatic adherence to a desire for a story that has more than what can be described (if only, at times, as the "unknown") by science (an empty set in my world) and more than rationality (special definition for philosophers I have to study).

¹    i.e.: Humans are creatures that need hope.  So here's your hope you poor bastards: your life sucks and you are going to have a better one after you die (trust me) but in the meantime you are bad so even though you are being abused you better not feel anything but contempt for yourself and for fuck's sake do not try to keep others from this same cruel fate (no birth control, but humans need sex). 

²    After working his way from half-owner of a $5,000 pizza shop in Ypsilanti, Michigan, by his own wits and largely self-financed, to private holder of a company he sold for over $1 billion, Tom turned around (he wasn't always religious) and blamed (carefully chosen verb) his success on God.