I was raised to believe the catholic church was the great abomination by a Fanatical Salvation army mother who did not even like me associating with Catholic children.
Yet exposed me from a young age to pictures of a broken and bloody Christ, graphic representations of Hell and the devil, told me stories of the torturous horrors that befell Satan worshipers honestly believing the night terrors, bad dreams and nervous disposition she was instilling to a four year old would save my soul for her god.
The more I read of this sort of thing, catholic and protestant the more I become assured Christianity is a death cult, filled with blood worship, ritual cannibalism and monstrous mental abuse and sacred lies (That's before you get to the doctrinal physical abuse and the not so doctrinal sexual abuse.)

My sister and I used to compete to be the first ones out of the church. We were the two youngest of a large family.
We'd position ourselves to be last into the pew so we could be first out.
That didn't always work so then we'd jockey our position by timing our communion.
Once, I had the aisle seat so refused to take communion to lose my position. I felt very guilty.

I am thankful I was not raised Catholic. Being raised strict Lutheran was bad enough. I was terrified of an abusive god throwing me into eternal hell. Many nights I cried myself to sleep, afraid god would kill me and I would wake up in hell. The pastor used to force me and other kids to recite memorized material in front of the whole congregation. If we performed poorly, the pastor would shame us in front of everyone. Then our parents would punish us. It was awful.

The whole gamut was always creepy to me since I remember

No memories, but it seems obvious that if you want to control others for your own profit and power, then creating an ideology, which as Hitchins said, is. "A cult of suffering." Seems like a good way to justify all the harm you are going to do in the process.

This isn't a best Catholic recollection but after reading about your experiences with the church it made me think, mostly because some of the things you were exposed to were so weird, about something that happened to my mother.

My parents were not religious. My mother was raised in a Catholic home. I found out that my mother was raped by a catholic priest when she was 9 years old. Her brother, my Uncle Tony, tried to kill him with an ax. He was 12 years old. Their father stopped Tony, telling him the priest was a man of god and we don't question him. The mindless support people give the church is astonishing to me. I did not know about this incident in my mothers life until after her death. It explained so much to me about why my mother hated religion and the church. She never told me about it.