Daredevil and Performative Catholicism in American Politics

When a fictional superhero is a real Catholic but powerful politicians betray the faith

Mar 16, 2025

Lenten greetings and Happy Sunday from the self-destructing empire, friends and fellow Catholics. It’s surreal here.

The new season of one of Marvel’s most famous Catholic superheroes debuted on Netflix during Shrovetide while the world’s wealthiest immigrant has become an antiprophet for MAGAvangelical nativists.

“Daredevil: Born Again” airs throughout Lent and will conclude during Holy Week.

Meanwhile, two of America’s most prominent politicians, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, are seemingly competing to be the most publicly hypocritical Catholics. They are self-serving, pick-me turncoats, but “border czar” Tom Homan seems even more heartless.

Daredevil is a fictional Irish-American lawyer raised by a priest after his dad refused to take a fall in a rigged boxing match. He’s one of the good guys.

His Catholic ethos compels him to fight for Hell’s Kitchen. Nowhere else in New York, it seems, but his public service is vastly, quantifiably more Christian than the performative Catholicism of Vance or Rubio, or Homan’s cruel immigration policies.

Like any real Catholic, Daredevil is riddled with guilt. He is deeply tormented by injustice and his inability to save everyone. The visual pageantry of Catholicism is often lazy writing and set dressing when producers depict conflicts between good and evil. But Matt Murdock, while fictional, doesn’t just pray in Catholic churches for the baroque backdrops. He’s seeking guidance and strength.

One mortal man has made a professional career legally defending vulnerable people by day and protecting and avenging them as a vigilante by night. He lives a thankless, dangerous double life, risking his own health, safety, personal relationships, and would-be loves to protect strangers from forces of evil.

Daredevil finances this double life at his own expense and constant legal jeopardy - all for the greater good. But the “Christian” politicians we pay with our tax dollars to serve and protect us exploit their power to subjugate our own people—and our vulnerable neighbors.

J.D. Vance

An adult convert to Catholicism with an Evangelical upbringing and a Hindu wife of immigrant parents, J.D. Vance’s politics are so ungodly that Pope Francis himself felt compelled to correct him.

Within days of the inauguration, the MAGA 2.0 administration started its first wave of deporting immigrants from “shithole countries”.1 And the man who married a first-generation Telugu Indian-American (in a Hindu/Baptist wedding with both a pandit and a preacher officiating) tried to invoke a beloved fifth-century Catholic theologian and saint to defend mass deportation. He failed.

"There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that," Vance claimed in an interview.2

The internet immediately descended into amateur scriptural debate from 1 Timothy to Acts to the Good Samaritan parable to Matthew to John. Armchair theologians with a scarcity mentality challenged Biblical scholars. The literalists argued with the contextualists that “not providing for your family is denying the faith”3 demonstrated a misguided belief that generosity is a zero-sum game: either you love your family or you can love strangers. My fellow Catholics, I assure you, you can do both.

As with most religious infighting, people cherry-picked the verses that reinforced their preexisting beliefs and, in this case, absolved them of answering the call to love their neighbor as themselves.

Pope Francis entered the chat to clarify the Christian principle ‘ordo amoris.’ The Holy See invoked it to defend vulnerable immigrants after the vice president used it to justify arresting them in churches and deporting them to notorious military prisons.4

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. … The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” Pope Francis explained.

Vance, a born-and-raised Evangelical, chose St. Augustine as his patron saint when he converted to Catholicism in 2019. And now he is trying to convince Americans that shipping vulnerable people on military aircraft to undisclosed locations without access to attorneys, communication, or human rights is “charity” that “starts at home.” What he/MAGA actually seems to mean is that charity stops at home. It will be extended no further.

When St. Thomas Aquinas expounded on Augustine’s “On Christian Teaching” in his “Summa Theologiae” in the 13th century, he described ordo amoris more in terms of a love that radiates outwards, not that it tapers the further it gets from its origin. Our morality calls us to recognize a universal humanity and love beyond borders.5

Even if your scriptural interpretation restricts you to a descending moral hierarchy of decreasing obligation, the U.S. government is not an individual. How you decide to live your faith, whether you choose to follow the innumerable calls throughout the Old Testament, New Testament, and the Gospels to be kind to “the least of these”, a “Christian” government has expansive resources and international diplomatic incentives to help people.

Deuteronomy 27:19 Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow.

Isaiah 16:3–4 “Help us,” they cry. “Defend us against our enemies. Protect us from their relentless attack. Do not betray us now that we have escaped. Let our refugees stay among you. Hide them from our enemies until the terror is past.”

Vance has extensive personal experience with three major faith traditions, but adheres to the true values of none of them.

Marco Rubio

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s hypocrisy is not that he spoke publicly with an unusually perfect cross stenciled onto his forehead with shoe polish at the beginning of this Lenten season.

If you decal your forehead with a temporary Ash Wednesday tattoo, fine. Though there is debate among Catholics about whether or not this is “preaching from street corners” instead of “not letting the left hand know what the right hand does”, what is most important is how you love and serve in this world. We can question your motives for “wearing” your religion, but if you live your faith, no one can doubt your true intentions.

Rubio’s hypocrisy is in his policies and his loyalties.

Since the 2016 campaign, the former Florida senator has gone from implying that Trump wets his pants6 and repeatedly calling him a conman to defending Trump’s ludicrous and appalling musings about annexing Canada as a 51st American state to a Group of Seven foreign ministers’ meeting in Quebec itself.7

The son of Cuban immigrants now occupies the country’s most esteemed and highest-profile position of international diplomacy but defends and reinforces harsh immigration policies devoid of Christian compassion.

When Rubio’s grandfather Pedro Victor García left his job working for Castro’s communist government, he illegally immigrated to the U.S. in 1962. His immigration records reflect that officials at the time feared he might have “communist sympathies.” That charge would have him declared a national security threat during the Cold War.8 But he wanted to join his wife and seven daughters, who were already in the U.S. after they first came years before.

Officials did not believe he was fleeing oppression, as he claimed, but by all accounts, he was humanely detained, interviewed through an interpreter, and granted “parolee” status, allowing him to stay in the country and join his family even though he didn’t speak English, have a legal visa, or qualify for a green card.9

But his American grandson wants to restrict “chain migration,” limiting the definition of family to “nuclear,” a definition that would not have allowed him to grow up with the man whose “counsel he still relies on” and whose “respect he still craves” 30 years after his passing. Two of Rubio’s aunts and an uncle were also admitted to the U.S. as refugees.

As a presidential candidate in 2012, he conflated the dates of his parents’ immigration to campaign on the American dream narrative that they had bravely escaped communism to build a better life.10

He has flip-flopped on his own 2013 immigration reform bill11 in a series of moves proving his motivation is self-serving political expedience, not what’s “true to our values as a nation of compassion," as he said in one of his many contradicting statements.12

When he campaigned again in 2016, he stumped against Syrian refugees fleeing persecution, but in 2024, he introduced a bill to help reunite Korean American families separated from their North Korean relatives.13

Since 2018, he’s prevaricated about MAGA’s family separation policy instead of speaking out against it decisively.14

Rubio’s inconsistencies and oppositions do not align with Catholic values, nor extend the same opportunities to vulnerable families that benefited his family tremendously.

Tom Homan

“Our upbringing was very conservative and very Catholic. We went to Mass every Sunday and sat in the same pew every time. God help anyone who arrived before us and sat in our seats!”15 Tom Homan, the former ICE director laughed in an interview.

His inhumane immigration and family separation policies invoke the same baseless entitlement to our borders as his family apparently feels about “their” pews.

The original architect of the MAGA 1.0 family separation policy that devastated thousands of families, not as an unfortunate byproduct officials were willing to risk but rather as the premeditated and punitive consequences intended to deter future migrants by further terrifying them16 is bragging: “I will run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”17

MAGA 2.0 reappointed an unofficial title/nickname that does not require Senate confirmation or legislative oversight but endows him with extraordinary, unchecked federal power: “border czar.”18 This position is as informal and as dangerous as Elon Musk’s nebulous role at “DOGE.”

Homan describes himself as a “devout Mass-goer” but publicly dismissed entreaties from Pope Francis himself to honor and care for the humanity of migrants.

“I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” Pope Francis said.19

“Concentrate on the Catholic Church. You’ve got a lot of problems right there in the Catholic Church,” Homan retorted publicly. “You have enough to fix in your own home. Leave the border stuff to us. We know what we’re doing.”20

Every Catholic’s “home” is God’s entire green Earth until we are called to Heaven. National borders do not limit our faith or our obligations. While we wait on this Earthly plain, “loving the foreigner among you, giving them food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10: 18-19) is one of our many Christian opportunities/duties to serve God.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “The political community has a duty to honor the right to emigrate” (2211). It further specifies that “the more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him” (2241).

Elected or not, Catholic or not, it seems powerful men worship power more than any religion they claim as their own. They will abandon their own faith teachings and their family blessings to deny opportunity, safety, and freedom to the people suffering without it.

Maybe if we lived in Marvel’s Hell’s Kitchen, Daredevil could save us from President Wilson Fisk, his corrupt associates, and his henchmen.

Daredevil doesn’t have the far-reaching power, authority, or taxpayer-funded resources as a vice president or a secretary of state or a “border czar.” But his conscience is the only currency that motivates him.

Here’s hoping our most powerful politicians will learn from Daredevil’s quest for justice.

With Liberty

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