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I always get nervous when I hear there’s some new pop culture character out there who’s Catholic. I want to believe that if writers are going to make a character’s faith an important part of their identity, they will proceed with some nuance about what that looks like. But most of the time instead we get things like ‘Now Nightcrawler is a priest and he’s super preachy,’ when we all know he just wants to be a pirate and hang out with Amanda Sefton.

Matt Murdock has always been the one exception to the rule. No matter who the writer and artists are, Daredevil creative teams always seem to understand how a life of faith fits in a normal Catholic’s life. In fact, Matt Murdock has been so well written and portrayed over the years, I find he actually has helped me make sense of my own life as a Catholic. 

The two big misconceptions (superhero) writers have about being Catholic

Here are two things that most writers don’t understand about being Catholic: First, very few of us (priests and nuns included) wear our faith on our sleeve. Being Catholic is not about walking around condemning people for their life choices or talking about God (despite what some very outspoken Catholics suggest). Most Catholics who are invested in their faith express it through the ways they treat people. Which is very Matt Murdock; Rather than constantly talking about God or getting caught up in church politics, Matt expresses his faith in his willingness to put himself on the line for the vulnerable, both as a lawyer and as a superhero. 

Second, being Catholic is an often-confusing stew of gratitude and self-sacrifice, over-responsibility and shame. We believe in a God who made the universe and everything in it. On the one hand that means we’re supposed to enjoy our lives; this world, our friends, our existence is a gift. On the other hand, we’re told that we have an enormous, ongoing responsibility toward everyone around us. Everyone is a child of God, worthy of love and our help, even those who have hurt us. And don’t even get me started about sex.

Daredevil is the epitome of being Catholic 

Matt has all of that churning inside him all the time. He is constantly and simultaneously the Catholic guy who goes too far and the one who feels like he has never done enough; the guy who loves life and his friends and a good romance, and who hates himself too much to just accept being loved. No matter what promises or guardrails he puts in place to reset his life in a healthier way, he always eventually ends up a disaster. He and Peter Parker are the two great flop heroes of the Marvel Universe. But where Peter always eventually loses because the universe just won’t let him win, in Matt’s case the wound is always self-inflicted. Even with the can’t-miss sharpshooter Bullseye as his mortal enemy, in the end Matt always takes down himself. 

Put simple, he’s a hot mess, a Catholic cautionary tale. This is what happens if you try to take all the contradictory and confusing demands of our faith too seriously—you end up crying in the gutter about something you messed up and refusing to take your friends’ calls because you’re busy deciding whether it’s too late to wake your priest to hear your confession. Matt, you don’t need a priest, you need a therapist and probably a vacation. Also, it is definitely too late to ask that priest to hear your confession, I don’t care if your mom was a nun or not. 

But as someone who definitely worries about whether he’s done enough for other people (or really anything), watching Matt is like getting to see some of my crazy from the outside. And in feeling for him, I gain a little empathy for myself. And a little freedom from all that goop in my head. Rather than “SINNER” I can see that part of me as like my earnest little brother who thinks you really can grow up to be a superhero. He’s sweet and I love him, but he’s kind of a goofball. 

What Daredevil's Catholicism means to me

On the surface, Matt Murdock seems like an icon of despair. Even if he usually wins whatever war he’s waging, it’s always only at a massive cost to him and those he loves. 

And yet for me, he’s always an image of hope. And it’s not because he always gets back up no matter what, though I can see how that might appeal to others. For me, it’s that he chooses to fight—also to love, to have friends, to enjoy life—in the first place. He grew up in a place so brutal it was called Hell’s Kitchen. It took his eyesight and his father. And yet somehow he believed in it and its people. He saw its possibilities. Where Batman, with whom Daredevil is often compared, is always in part reacting to the past and what happened to his parents, Daredevil is always looking forward to what could be, and what he believes lies beneath the thick scum on the surface.

St. Paul describes faith as “the evidence of things not seen.” Watching Matt reminds me that it’s not all up to me, and also that having hope in the world or in people is not about what you can already see. 

Fear not, we have the essentials when it comes to Marvel's Daredevil - especially with Marvel Studios' Daredevil: Born Again. Check out:

• The key difference between Netflix's Daredevil and Marvel Studios' Daredevil: Born Again, according to the showrunner
• The best Daredevil stories of all time
• What to watch before Daredevil: Born Again 
• Popverse Picks: Our favorite things for Marvel's Man Without Fear including Ann Nocenti comics, the Netflix series, and more
• How Vincent D'Onofrio reinvented Daredevil's Kingpin
• Marvel's Daredevil actors, ranked from Charlie Cox to Ben Affleck and even Rex Smith
• How Frank Miller accidentally killed a Daredevil cartoon (and Marvel killed a book to avoid pissing him off)
• That time we caught Daredevil actor Charlie Cox sneaking into New York Comic Con as Bluey