During his last trip to Rome in April 1900, Oscar Wilde wrote: “My position is curious: I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent papist”. A few months later, he was received into the Church on his deathbed, years after having first flirted with Roman Catholicism while a student at Oxford. This essay attempts to show that the Church which fascinates Wilde is not so much a community of believers or a hierarchical structure as the locus of a highly subjective experience. Private judgement (religious or aesthetic) is at the heart of his “religion”, and he tends to see the Roman Church through a fundamentally Protestant lens. Of course, the main element of attraction in Catholicism for Wilde is that, precisely, it is not Protestant and thus represents an un-English, exotic world of Latin, incense clouds and beautiful vestments. Yet, at the same time, Wilde focuses on aspects of the Catholic faith that are most polemical in the late-Victorian context—the very same aspects that are highlighted and denounced in the anti-Catholic pamphlets of the time. Wilde’s Catholic temptation, just like Dorian Gray’s, is first and foremost a revolt against the society that shaped him, a Protestant’s provocation geared at his own world.