Eventually convinced of the validity of the Catholic position, he was waiting his mother's agreement to his leaving the Church of his birth: an event she dreaded.
One night, towards the end of the war, he knocked at the door of Italian Capuchins in Trebizond demanding to be received into the Catholic Church on the spot.
In 1918, just as the Alexander Kerensky government was about to fall, and be succeeded by Vladimir Lenin's coup d'état, Rzewuski undertook a dangerous journey to Saint Petersburg to recoup some of the family's money from the floundering banks.
Rzewuski successfully sought membership in religious life as a Dominican, and years later, with the novitiate and course of studies completed, he was ordained in 1932.
[6] His first assignment was to Albertinum[6] at Fribourg in Switzerland as spiritual director to the 200 international seminarians, sent here by their bishops from around the world to study under the Dominicans.
Rzewuski was extremely unimpressed with their lack of intellectual passion and their professional ambition to become important in the clerical field of Church politics.
He suffered here for 13 years, but he did make some friends, among them the theologian Charles Journet and Liane de Pougy, and frequently sought some refreshment at the Charterhouse of Valsainte.