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.

God lurks everywhere. That's the fundamental Catholic instinct on the imaginative and poetic level-that God is lurking everywhere. Right down the street, right around the corner, there's God.

God draws straight with crooked lines.

The Catholic imagination is metaphorical or sacramental. It sees God as present in the world. The Protestant imagination, the dialectical imagination, wants to preserve God from the possibility of idolatry by identifying with His creatures. Catholicism has no problem with that.