An Untroubled Believer

            ...... it was the ceremony of the mass that eased his soul ; the sweetish smoke trailing from the censer, the ringing of the bell, the Latin incantations of the priest. In Warsaw he attended early mass, at a small church near the apartment, once or twice a month, confessing to his vocational sins - duplicity, for example- in the oblique forms provided by Catholic protocol. He'd grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that.

Alan Furst
Spies of Warsaw
2006