The most famous example of Catholic art in the world is Michelangelo’s Pietà. Countless people have reflected on the grief of mother Mary as she holds the lifeless body of Jesus. The viewer enters the drama of the Passion, marveling at the serenity on Mary’s face as she nestles her adult child in her lap like an infant.
“Adult child” — the phrase bears tension. And upon further reflection, the viewer notices something wrong with this picture. The ages of the figures are not realistic: Mary’s face is that of a young woman, a woman of the age at which she gave birth to Jesus, not of the age of his death. Thus the artwork causes time to flicker between two moments, between Jesus’ birth and his death, between the young woman whose soul would one day be pierced by the tragic fate of the infant in her arms (Luke 2:35) and the older man whose body was pierced on the cross (John 19:34). The renowned sculpture captures the dual biblical mystery of Jesus’ Incarnation (God become human) and Passion (his suffering and death).
Those who read their Bibles carefully also know that this scene — Mary holding Jesus’ body after the crucifixion — never happens in the text. This most famous piece of biblical art is literally not in the Bible. To find the Pietà in the Bible, one reads between the lines of the text, allowing a process of imagination to unfurl the folds of the story. The text does describe Jesus’ mother there at the cross (John 19:25). So of course she held his body — what mother wouldn’t?
The Catholic approach to the Bible has been shaped by this kind of imagination; devotional meditations on suffering and grace draw on biblical narratives while going beyond strict correspondence to the text. Many Catholics have learned such methods of biblical visualization from Ignatian spirituality, the 500-year-old tradition stemming from the “spiritual exercises” of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus — the Jesuits. In the summation of Father James Martin S.J., “Ignatian contemplation encourages you to place yourself imaginatively in a scene from the Bible. For example, if you’re praying about Jesus and his disciples caught in a boat during a storm on the Sea of Galilee, you would try to imagine yourself on board with the disciples and ask yourself several questions as a way of trying to place yourself in the scene.”
To be sure, biblical visualization in prayer existed long before the Jesuits, as modeled by medieval mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila, St. Bonaventure and St. Hildegard of Bingen. Today, the imaginative process still remains an essential mode by which the Bible infuses Catholic spiritual life, guiding the biblical devotions of the rosary, the Stations of the Cross and the Mexican tradition of Las Posadas. In Martin’s words: “God can work through your imagination.”
The Catholic biblical imagination also focuses in a dramatic fashion, arguably more so than any other Christian tradition, on the two figures of the Pietà: Jesus and Mary. Here they are together, in between the lines of the text: both suffering, both full of grace.
The traditional Pietà has been adapted often in the visual arts, but one underappreciated musical example comes from the work of Bruce Springsteen — the rocker you might associate with open roads, union cards and dozens of hard-luck-but-laughing-and-loving-through-it-all hit songs. For over 50 years, culminating in his acclaimed, 2016 memoir Born to Run and his one-man liturgy of story and song, Springsteen on Broadway, the Boss has made sustained contributions to the Catholic imagination. In the book and the show, he recounts a childhood thick with Catholicism: “We lived spitting distance from the Catholic church, the priests’ rectory, the nuns’ convent, the St. Rose of Lima grammar school, all of it just a football’s toss away across a field of wild grass. I literally grew up surrounded by God. Surrounded by God — and my relatives.”
During the tour in support of his album Devils & Dust (2005), he introduced the song “Jesus Was an Only Son” by describing this Catholic upbringing, workshopping material that would later appear in the memoir. Then he would add: “I wrote a lot of songs about parents and children on this record, and so I thought, well, you know, I’m going to try to write something from the standpoint of Jesus as someone’s child. And what it’s like to have your children choose their own destiny, as they do.”
The ballad has an efficient six-stanza quatrain set to a simple melody, sung over the basic three-chord major progression of folk music. The form and content of the music could not be much simpler, but the biblical reflection is deceptively deep. The lyrics resemble one of St. Ignatius’ spiritual exercises or the meditative practice of lectio divina. Springsteen enters the biblical landscape and imagines Jesus simply as someone’s child. What would Jesus look like learning his ABCs? Would he have nightmares? How would he feel about his fate, knowing he would leave his mother bereft? The biblical evidence for Jesus’ relationship with his mother is sparse: birth and death and not much in between. Anyone who wants to think through these ideas with these minimal texts will have to do some reading between the lines.
With each stanza, Springsteen recalls a biblical theme but either redefines it or reimagines its power. The title and first line already do just that: In the biblical tradition and the subsequent creeds of the Catholic Church, Jesus is the “only son” of the heavenly Father. Theologically, this connotes divine power, unity of will and earthly authority. But the meaning of the phrase changes when one focuses on Jesus as an “only son” of his mother: It evokes care, education and protection, but also profound loss, the horror of losing a child. Grace meets suffering, as Mary gratia plena, “full of grace,” is also mater dolorosa, “the sorrowful mother.”
When did Jesus feel most like an only son to Mary? In Springsteen’s song, it was both when he approached his final fate (“as he walked up Calvary hill / His mother Mary walking beside him / In the path where his blood spilled,” verse 1) and during his early childhood years (“as he lay reading the Psalms of David / At his mother’s feet,” verse 2).
Most of the lyrics meditate on suffering, but verses 2 and 3 express the grace of the everyday. What do mothers do every day with their children? They teach them, read with them, play with them. Jesus would naturally be learning with the most memorable texts of the Jewish tradition, the Psalms of David. In verse 3, Springsteen cites the prophecy that Mary’s heart would be “pierced” by her son’s death, a biblical text which he probably learned through the rosary’s meditation on the mater dolorosa and the corresponding artwork with seven swords piercing her heart.
At Springsteen’s imagined Gethsemane, Jesus “prayed for the life he’d never live” (verse 4). During the live version of the song, he interlaces a poignant spoken word meditation about Gethsemane, about the inner thoughts of Jesus that night. He performs lectio divina on the temptation of Jesus to walk away from his destiny, the temptation to “come down from the cross” and “save himself,” which is biblical in origin (Mark 15:30) and famously expanded by the novel and film, The Last Temptation of Christ.
The meditation ends by recapitulating the childhood scene. Mary comforted Jesus as a boy afraid of his dreams; now Jesus comforts Mary as he approaches a fearsome demise. “Mother, still your tears / For remember the soul of the universe / Willed a world and it appeared” (verse 6). This too is rooted in the biblical witness, as Jesus cares for his mother from the cross (John 19:26–27) and addresses women of Jerusalem on his way there (Luke 23:28–31, transmitted liturgically also as the eighth Station of the Cross).
How, then, was Springsteen’s Jesus “an only son?” He was an only son of his mother at the cross; and he was an only son of his mother during his childhood. The chronology of the poem oscillates only between those two time periods.
In other words, this poem, this song, this spiritual exercise is nothing less than his Pietà. With a faith formed by the Catholic biblical imagination — the Gospels, devotional prayers, family bonds and Michelangelo’s sculpture itself — Springsteen sings the inner thoughts of those marble figures. In the Bible as in everyday life, grace and suffering flicker back and forth, the extraordinary shining through the ordinary, in birth and in death, surrounded by God and our relatives.
Michael Peppard ’98 is Professor of Theology at Fordham University and the author, most recently, of How Catholics Encounter the Bible (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). He presented a longer version of this essay as a paper at the “Ever Ancient, Ever Knew: On Catholic Imagination” conference held in fall 2024 at the University of Notre Dame and co-sponsored by the deNicola Center for Ethics and Culture.