Paul McCartney’s Catholic pulse
John Mac Ghlionn• June 10, 2025
Paul McCartney turns 83 on June 18. And while most will toast the melodies—those ageless hooks, that grin that launched a thousand harmonies—fewer will remember the Masses. But they mattered. Because before there was Shea Stadium, before there were screaming girls and sitars and acid epiphanies, there was a boy in a church pew, fumbling for meaning beneath the stained glass. Raised Catholic in Liverpool, McCartney’s early life was shaped not just by music, but by mystery. The kind that only Catholicism—with its incense, its sorrow, its whispers of redemption—knows how to keep alive.
You can hear it if you listen closely—not in grand declarations, but in the tremble beneath the chord changes. Catholicism doesn’t shout; it seeps. And in McCartney’s work, it’s everywhere. It’s in the longing, the ache, the dignity of sorrow that feels too ancient to be accidental. The Beatles may have been the soundtrack of a cultural revolution, but underneath the haircuts and heresies was something older, quieter, heavier. Something liturgical. Even when the lyrics weren’t explicitly religious, the emotional architecture often was: guilt, grace, reverence, loss, redemption. Take “Let It Be.” Most hear a gentle plea for peace, a soft balm in the chaos of the times. But listen again. That “Mother Mary” isn’t just his mum. It’s the Blessed Virgin, cloaked in the ambiguity McCartney has always favored. Raised on Hail Marys, candle smoke, and the slow solemnity of Sunday Mass, McCartney didn’t need to spell it out. Catholicism teaches you that not everything sacred has to be brazenly broadcast—it can be whispered, veiled, encoded in melody.
The line works as a prayer and as a memory, and that’s the point. Catholicism is layered like that. It doesn’t deal in either/or. It’s a faith of double meanings: wine and blood, sin and grace, silence and song. It trains you to appreciate the profundity of paradoxes—not to resolve them, but to live inside them. To understand that truth can be both hidden and revealed. That suffering can sanctify. That God can hang on a cross and still reign as king. And in McCartney’s songwriting, that instinct lives on. “Let It Be” isn’t just a lullaby for the broken-hearted. It’s a modern psalm: one part maternal comfort, one part theological echo.
Widely considered a love song, “Eleanor Rigby” could and perhaps should be viewed as a requiem. After all, it’s a cold, intentional meditation on despair, depression, and death, along with the suffocating anonymity of modern life. “All the lonely people / Where do they all belong?” It could be the sermon at a funeral Mass. Eleanor, quietly tending to a church that no longer tends to her, dies alone and unnoticed. Father McKenzie, stitching up sermons no one hears, delivers her eulogy to empty pews.
That’s not pop. That’s Catholicism in its most tragic register: the fear of dying unseen, unredeemed, unremembered. The ache for ritual in a world that’s stopped showing up. The priest speaks, the body is buried, and no one comes. But still the rites are performed. That’s the tension. The world may forget you, but the Lord doesn’t.
McCartney never preached, but his early lyrics carried the echoes of catechism: a sense of ache, of reverence, of reaching for something just out of frame. The emotional palette of someone raised to believe that life had meaning, that actions had consequences, that sorrow could be redemptive. Even in their most secular anthems, the Beatles couldn’t quite scrub off the sacred. “Help!” sounds like a call for therapy, but it’s something deeper—a plea not just for relief, but for meaning. Raw, desperate, and cast upward, it’s the sound of someone who was taught that cries don’t vanish into the void—they land somewhere. Meanwhile, “Yesterday” aches with absence—the quiet kind that lingers in the air after something truly significant slips away. It’s not just nostalgia; it’s mourning for a wholeness that can’t be reclaimed, a melody shaped by the kind of silence you learn in church: reflective, resonant, often sobering. These weren’t just chart-toppers. They were laced with something ancient. Not overtly religious, but unmistakably reverent.
And it wasn’t just Paul. George Harrison, though later drawn to Hindu mysticism, was also raised Catholic. You can hear it in the tone, in the solemnity, in the way he handled the idea of the soul like something fragile and real. His later work may have looked eastward, but the yearning was western first—shaped by crucifixes, childhood rosaries, and the unshakable idea that music should serve a purpose larger than the self. Catholicism didn’t just teach Harrison to seek the divine—it taught him to channel it. Even Lennon, the supposed iconoclast, carried the imprint. Though Anglican by upbringing, his great-uncle was a Catholic priest. His family tree was tangled with both denominations, and you can feel the push-pull in his early writing. Lennon rejected belief with fury precisely because belief had once gripped him. His rage was theological. “Imagine” wasn’t a void—it was a challenge to the heavens he’d once feared.
McCartney, for his part, never denied. He drifted. Gently. As so many do. Nevertheless, Catholicism, for him, hummed beneath floorboards. It was in the structure of things. In the ritual of songwriting. Verse, chorus, absolution.
Even in his solo work, you can still feel it—that quiet undercurrent, that longing toward something transcendent. “Maybe I’m Amazed” isn’t a creed, but it’s close: a man stunned by a love that steadies him when nothing else can. “Calico Skies” was written during a hurricane blackout—literally by candlelight—and it shows. It’s a quiet hymn to simplicity, to love without noise. “My Valentine,” released decades later, feels like it could’ve been written a century ago, timeless and unguarded. These aren’t declarations. They’re offerings. No cynicism, no irony—just a man, stripped of pretense, still capable of being moved.
Macca’s no theologian. He’s never claimed to be. But great artists don’t have to explain the faith that formed them—they just need to carry it. And McCartney has carried it, much to his credit, through revolutions and reunions, tragedies and triumphs.
Happy birthday to the man who never needed a pulpit—just a piano, a pen, and the weight of Liverpool’s old cathedrals still ringing in his chest.
(Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)