Born To Run
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

The young Bruce Springsteen stopped being a Catholic on his eighth-grade graduation day and for a time believed that he’d walked away for good. Later, though, “I came to ruefully and bemusedly understand that once you’re a Catholic, you’re always a Catholic … deep inside … I’m still on the team.”

The Springsteens lived in a holy corner of Freehold, New Jersey. The house he lived in, the yard he played in, were eventually sold to make a new parking lot for the St Rose of Lima Church where as a youngster he’d pulled on a “cassock” (his word) to assist a grouchy monsignor. Schooldays were under the same regime, and Springsteen still reacts strongly both to the “corporal and emotional strain” of the nuns’ teaching, and to occasional, unlooked-for acts of kindness, as when Sister Charles Marie, who had assisted at a beating, ended a sore and tearful day by handing over a small holy medal.

“This was the world where I found the beginnings of my song.” It was also the world which helped to shape Springsteen’s political conscience, which is deeply, if not always explicitly, marked by Catholic Social Teaching. The latter-day hunger songs on  Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad are marked by a strong strain of subsidiarity and, as a corollary, a lack of faith in big government.