It's not directly relevant to Catholics except insofar as the writer was in the process of ceasing to be a Catholic at the time he wrote it, and would have had these questions no doubt in mind with respect to his own family - but there's also Donne's suggestion in "Satire 3" that the virtue of the ancients might be "imputed faith" by God - in this case acting as a kind of celestial clearing bank, where outdate pagan virtues that are no longer legal tender can be converted to crisp new Christian ones.