I had never met the Roman Catholuc Church outside of a history book. To come across it living, so to speak, was like finding a diplodocus.

The Roman Catholic Church isn't going to change its theologies.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

[I]t seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn't Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn't it expert in superstition? I somehow doubted that the hospitable plain Protestant chapels that dotted the university could be much help; they didn't look qualified to wrestle with the undead. I felt sure those big square Puritan churches on the town green would be helpless in the face of a European vampire. A little witch burning was more in their line--something limited to the neighbors.

Roman Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our awakening world.

I find it extraordinary that anyone would have an intellectual conversion to Roman Catholicism.