George Moore’s relationship to religion was notoriously complex, hovering between classical paganism, atheistic rationalism and various forms of Christianity. Two of his lesser-known novels, Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901), which follow the life of a Wagnerian opera singer who undergoes a radical conversion and becomes a nun, offer a vision of Catholicism marked both by fin-de-siècle fascination for the aesthetics of the liturgy and by ironic distanciation. This article explores Moore’s representation of two forms of Catholic devotion in Evelyn Innes, mass and the confession, and shows how Moore discreetly satirizes his heroine’s devotion, while never completely departing from a form of empathy. The idea that the Catholic liturgy is a spectacle – typical of the literary Catholicism of the fin de siècle – runs through the novel, suggesting that it is the same sensuous emotions that draw Evelyn to the stage and to mass. The narrative constantly moves back and forth between church and stage, religion and art, Wagner and Christ, but rather than building up oppositions between those two poles, it creates analogies: Roman Catholicism in Evelyn Innes is not opposed to Wagnerian role playing. On the contrary, attending mass is for Evelyn a mere transposition of the aesthetic experience of performing Wagner’s operas, Sin and the act of confession are similarly aestheticized. Evelyn’s perspective, which dominates the narrative, is permeated with an obsession with sinfulness, and remorse, shame and culpability characterize her view of herself – another typical element of the Decadent Catholic aesthetics and its glorification of the beauty of sin, verging sometimes on masochism. This theatricalized representation of sin and repentance culminates in the confession scenes that punctuate the novel: the sacrament is for Evelyn the theatre in which she can play the part of the sinner caught in the wiles of Satan, an aesthetic and psychological rather than religious necessity. This aestheticized representation of Catholicism means that Evelyn Innes cannot be read as a conventional conversion narrative: it is not the old story of the actress giving up a life of sensual pleasure to adopt an austere and godly existence. Rather, it is the story of a transposition, from the beauty of Wagnerian opera to that of the Roman liturgy, from the pose of the successful soprano to that of the repentant sinner, from one form of play-acting to another.