How Vice Distorts Healthy Appetites

Why do we fear those who drink blood when our own faith commands us to do the same? In this final chapter of A Catholic’s Guide to Monsters, we turn our attention to the vampire: not merely a monster, but a mirror of our deepest spiritual longings.Join us as we trace the vampire’s roots from the blood-drinking spirits of antiquity (the Mesopotamian ekimmu, Greek lamia, Roman strigae) to the medieval saints of the The Golden Legend whose dead rose to confess rather than devour.Then we follow the chilling case of Arnold Paole (1722 Serbia), a village, an exhumation, and a corpse that would not lie still — and how this horror led the Benedictine scholar Dom Augustin Calmet to ask: what happens when truth becomes terror?