A childhood belief about characters

At some point in my childhood, the subject of Henry VIII came up, along with the fact that he had some of his wives beheaded. I asked my mother why, and she said -- without providing any other context -- "Because he was Catholic". It's important to note here that my mother was not some kind of raving anti-Catholic bigot, she just somehow neglected to take into account that my brain at that stage of development was incapable of grasping the historical context of the Catholic church, its policies on divorce at the time, and all the other political factors involved. In any case, I subsequently spent a portion of my childhood believing that Catholics were horrible, scary people who cut their wives' heads off.