'How Catholics Brought Napoleon to his knees' by Andrew Roberts in the Catholic Herald (2nd January, 2015)
'…“She was on her way home from church when she felt labour pains,” Napoleon would say of his mother Letizia, “and had only time to get into the house, when I was born, not on a bed, but on a heap of tapestry.” Napoleon Bonaparte's fraught relations with the Catholic Church started early in life, for although his mother was a devout Catholic, his father was a Voltairean who despised popular religion. A secularised Enlightenment non-believer, Carlo Buonaparte did not even marry in church (although his wife's uncle Lucciano, the Archdeacon of Ajaccio in Corsica, altered the records to make it appear that he had)…'