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 Priest imagined 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 Priest speaks 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.

In his early 20s when he wrote that song, Springsteen confesses that:

I got scabs on my knees From kneeling way too long It’s about time I played the man Took a stand where I belong.

Springsteen has been working out where he belongs over a lifetime of extraordinary excellence. Fifty years after Born to Run, this summer he released seven new albums all at once. Over more than half a century of songwriting, he had written and recorded so much material, unused for one reason or the other, that at age 75 he released on one June day what for many others would be the work of a career.

Among those seven albums is a soundtrack for the screenplay of a spiritual Western movie, a film that never got made. It is Springsteen’s most religious album. Fittingly, it is called Faithless. But men without faith don’t write about faith quite so much.

There is the track All God’s Children, which offers this unsentimental assessment:

All God’s children got a place on earth … Glory in the morning I ain’t been to heaven but I’ve been to hell … I’m rolling with the moon and rising with the sun I’ll be ready when the rapture comes Glory Hallelujah.

A man who knows hell but still hopes for glory in the morning is not entirely faithless.

The most remarkable song is My Master’s Hand. Unlike Brilliant Disguise it is a song of trust, a song of faith:

I will pray to understand I will walk these barren lands I will follow His command I’ll be the hammer in my master’s hand

I’ll clear the stone from the dell I’ll raise the walls of the citadel I’ll wash them in the blood of the land I’ll be the hammer in my master’s hand

And when the devil’s wheel spins ‘round With sword and shield, I’ll lay him down His tongue and horn to ashes and sand I’ll be the hammer in my master’s hand

On the day our souls rise higher I’ll wear the robes of flame and fire When I reach those blessed lands I’ll live in the shelter of my master’s hand I’ll live in the love of my master’s hand.

From hammering the devil to sheltering in the Master’s hand — it’s the Augustinian journey, Jersey style. And for those in that hand, willing or not, the Master knows how to write straight with crooked lines.