Springsteen Wouldn’t Be Springsteen Without the Catholic Faith
National Catholic Register, 29 August 2025
The Boss’ seminal album ‘Born to Run’ was released 50 years ago this week.
The 50th anniversary this week of Bruce Springsteen’s breakthrough album, Born to Run, got wide notice, including as a Catholic event. Springsteen is arguably rock and roll’s leading Catholic songwriter.
“Once you’re Catholic, there is no getting out,” the Irish-Italian (his father the former, his mother the latter) has often said. Perhaps Springsteen would prefer to get out, but if he did, he would not know how to look at the world.
His songs are filled with references to “sinners” and the images of Catholic redemption. He sings of the “lonely pilgrim” (Brilliant Disguise) who “believe[s] in a promised land” (The Promised Land).
Had St. Augustine written rock and roll, his hungry heart would have made a good Springsteen song. Springsteen without the Catholic faith is simply not Springsteen.
“There existed the poetry, danger and darkness that reflected my imagination and my inner self,” he wrote of his Catholic boyhood at St. Rose of Lima parish in Freehold, New Jersey, in his 2016 memoir. “It has walked alongside me as a waking dream my whole life.”
Any account of Catholicism’s cultural impact must take account of the large majority of baptized Catholics who are not observant, and yet are shaped somehow by the Catholic faith. That majority, after all, is the primary field in which the seeds of the new evangelization are to be sown.
Some of the best Catholic art is produced by those who struggle with the Catholic faith. As the Gospels make clear, the struggling soul is closer to God than the smug one. The United States, having not produced a Catholic novelist quite like Graham Greene, has Springsteen, who has contributed, after a fashion, his own hymns to the American songbook.
A reviewer wrote of Greene’s partially autobiographical 1951 novel, The End of the Affair, that it was “the frictions of faith that brought Greene’s novels to life” and that “The End of the Affair is his masterpiece: an astonishing, painfully moving interrogation of the contradictions in a Catholicism he couldn’t live without but struggled to live with.”
The faith somehow remains, as it does for tens of millions of Catholics who have chosen to live distant from the Church, her sacraments, her worship, her doctrines. Springsteen sings of those sheep of the Lord’s flock.
His multi-year residency, Springsteen on Broadway, was part concert and part memoir. Springsteen spoke of his life’s work as a “long and noisy prayer” — but also as “magic.” Fair enough. There are many Christians who think of faith as a sort of magic and God as the great magician. Then Springsteen ended every show with the “ancient benediction” he recited every morning at St. Rose of Lima school, praying the Our Father.
Not only do the formulas of the faith remain, but the entire framework. Listen to Springsteen explain the genius of the E Street Band as a “communion of souls.”
“The secret of a band is that 1+1=3,” Springsteen explains. “That is when your life changes … when the world around you brings down the spirit and you feel blessed to be alive. It is the essential equation of love. There is no love without 1+1=3. It is the essential equation of art; it is the essential equation of rock and roll. It’s the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible. … And it’s the reason that true rock and roll, and true rock and roll bands, will never die.”
That’s not exactly Trinitarian theology, but it is not exactly not-Trinitarian either. There is an intuition there that the material world cannot explain the world of the spirit, and the spirit (the Holy Spirit?) is 1+1=3. It is the essential equation of communion, and thus the essential equation of what it means to be Catholic.
At the very beginning of Springsteen’s career was a song he wrote even before Born to Run, but didn’t release or perform for nearly 50 years. If I Was the Priestimagined the protagonist as a sort of Robin to Jesus’ Batman:
If Jesus was a sheriff and I was the priest If my lady was an heiress and my mama was a thief And papa rode shotgun on the Fargo line There’s still too many outlaws Tryin’ to work the same line.
The law and the outlaws are a theme that runs throughout Springsteen. They are the “saints and sinners” aboard the same train in his later anthem, Land of Hope and Dreams, in a sometimes pious, sometimes blasphemous combination. Real blasphemy first requires the acknowledgement of the holy. If I Was the Priestspeaks of the woman at the bar who goes to “Mass on Sunday and she sells her body on Monday.” Sunday worship makes Monday’s whoring blasphemous, and not merely banal.
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