The Catholic Church

I was watching Charlie Rose the other night and one of his guests brought up a point that brought chills to me (this is paraphrased):

The Catholic Church is the oldest bureaucratic organization in existence. It's pretty much the only thing left of the Roman Empire. The positions within the church all still have the names of the bureaucrats in the Roman Empire and they still speak Latin.

It made me think. Could we say that the Roman Empire didn't actually die, it's still around in a form that is pretty much guaranteed not to change? Maybe some people saw that the empire was dying and knew that religious dogma was the only way to save the organization. So, maybe religion itself wasn't the cause of the downfall, but the last minute effort to save at least a bit of the old empire. I guess I need to continue reading Gibbon, I'm a third of the way through the 1300 page long abridged tome.