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My grandma was from Calabria and my Grandpa was from County Cork.
Do you recall much how you felt about your father expressing doubts about this thing he thought his children should be doing?
My mom's father was from Calabria. Until I was around 10 or 11 years old my dad was literally working seven days a week, and he would usually leave for work before we woke up and often still be working after we went to bed. Money was tight. My mother was basically the one who raised us, said our prayers with us, etc. Things got much better financially by the time I was a young teenager. That's when he expressed his feelings about religion to me. I attended a Catholic elementary school, high school, and college, so I didn't lack adult religious role models. Also, I was close to my grandparents and cousins, who all were cynical Catholics too. So, by that point I had formed my own faith. I don't recall being devasted or even a little disturbed by his serious doubts. Sometimes as parents we think we can control how our kids think. We can't.
I grew up in what I can only describe as a strong, yet highly cynical immigrant Italian version of Roman Catholicism. My Irish friends had a reverence for the church, the priests and the nuns that my grandparents and parents never had. My grandmother told me stories about how priests in the local Italian villages all had girlfriends, though they claimed they observed the vow of chastity. I was given the sense that the only thing that really mattered was your relationship with God, and the lessons Jesus taught. The institutions were accorded respect, but with a nod and a wink.
More specifically, my father grappled with the same question you are asking. He let me know when I was fairly young that he had doubts about God, but he was absolutely convinced that it was good for children to be raised in the Catholic faith. It's strange that my mother was the more devout Catholic when they got married, while my dad's faith grew stronger only when he was approaching old age. He had enough objectivity to look at it as an insurance policy.
My wife and I raised our daughter as a Catholic, but our touch was fairly light. She received all the sacraments, but we weren't great about regular church attendance. Like most of her generation, she does not practice a formal religion as an adult, but she is spiritual.