I was delighted to read Clifford Longley’s column (5 April) about his conversion to Catholicism, as I had had no idea that, like me, he had been brought up as an atheist, with all the hard-wiring that that entails.I resonated with his description of the delicacy some converts might feel about not “making a great deal out of this”, for fear of – in my case – offending one’s previous fellow worshippers, but there is also a tension between this and the need to be a witness to the work of God in a conversion which he beautifully describes as being like moving from black-and-white to colour. I feel it is important for converts to stand up and be counted. My own experience of this transformation, after 30 years as a Quaker, was of being “lifted out of p