Daredevil: The Man Without Fear and White Catholic Masculinities

If you went to a local comic book store and randomly selected a single issue of Daredevil, its first few pages would likely provide all the back-story you need, even if you had never read a comic before. For the unacquainted, allow me to introduce the protagonist in question:

When Matt Murdock was a kid, he lost his sight in an accident involving radioactive chemicals. Though he could no longer see, the chemicals heightened Murdock’s other senses and imbued him with an amazing 360-degree radar sense. Now Matt uses his abilities to fight for his city as . . . Daredevil: The Man Without Fear!¹

Stan Lee and Bill Everett created the character (with artistic input from Jack Kirby) in 1964. In classic comic book fashion, his origin story involved not only the accidental gift of uncanny abilities but the murder of a parent. Matt was raised in the New York City neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen by his father “Battlin’ Jack” Murdock, a hardscrabble boxer. After the mob murders Jack for refusing to take a fall in a fight, his son dedicates his life to the pursuit of justice as both an attorney and a vigilante.

Comic book fans have long known that Murdock/Daredevil is a Catholic superhero.² Fans of Marvel Studios films and shows came to know this as well when he got his own Netflix series in 2015. The first episode of the series, “Into the Ring,” opens on the aftermath of the accident that blinded Murdock as a boy before it hard cuts to the dark interior of a confessional booth. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned,” an adult Murdock recites. “It’s been . . . it’s been too long since my last confession.” “I’m not seeking penance for what I’ve done, Father,” Murdock admits as the scene closes. “I’m asking forgiveness for what I’m about to do.”³ Remarkably, Marvel Studios decided to open one of the first attempts to expand its cinematic universe to television with a conversation between a Catholic and his confessor.

While one could make the case that Daredevil’s Catholicism has been implicit all along—he’s always been a working-class Irish American kid from New York, after all—it was not until Frank Miller began writing for Daredevil that the character’s faith was made explicit.⁴ Miller, who grew up as one of seven children in an Irish Catholic family in Vermont, is most famous for his Batman stories (most notably, The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One).⁵ But he first made his name drawing and writing Daredevil in 1979. By the time his initial run on the series ended in 1983 he had become “the most coveted talent in the industry.”⁶ Miller took what felt like a kitschy knock-off of brand Spider-Man and turned it into a gritty crime noir comic that forced readers to confront the “ugly physical violence” at the heart of the superhero genre itself.⁷ Making the character Catholic was part and parcel of this transformation. In fact, Miller later quipped that Daredevil “had to be Catholic, because only a Catholic could be a vigilante and an attorney at the same time.”⁸ The character has been canonically Catholic ever since. In this essay I want to ask two follow up questions. First, what, precisely, does it mean to call Daredevil “Catholic”? And second, what—if anything—can Daredevil teach us about US Catholicism?

Marvel’s daredevil (2015-2018) as catholic noir

The extent to which Murdock’s religiousness features in any given story—and indeed, whether it features at all—depends of course on the artists involved. Some center other elements of the Daredevil mythos (secret ninja societies, for instance). Most of the time Catholicism seems more like stained-glass window dressing, offering a thematic or aesthetic palette without much depth: fistfights in front of altars, vaguely religious themes, jokes about Catholic guilt. The Netflix series Marvel’s Daredevil (2015-2018) stands out as...