Stephen Colbert on meeting the pope, being Catholic and the spirituality of humor

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J."

Episode: Stephen Colbert on Meeting the Pope, Being Catholic, and the Spirituality of Humor
Release Date: July 8, 2025

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Introduction

In this poignant episode of The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J., hosted by America Media, Fr. Jim Martin welcomes his producer, Maggie Van Doren, and their special guest, renowned comedian and TV host Stephen Colbert. The episode delves deep into the interplay between faith and humor, exploring how spirituality influences Colbert's comedic journey and his experiences as a Catholic public figure.

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Setting the Context

Fr. Jim Martin begins the episode with a significant update:

"[00:00] Fr. Jim Martin: We recorded this episode just before the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV."

This revelation sets a profound backdrop for the discussions that follow, emphasizing the ever-evolving landscape of the Catholic Church and its leaders.

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Audience Question: Dealing with Hatred

Before delving into the main interview, Fr. Jim addresses an audience question from Karen:

"Karen asks, how should one act with people in one's life who do not love you and who instead seem to hate you?"

Fr. Jim Martin offers compassionate advice:

"[02:10] Fr. Jim Martin: The first thing to do is to treat them with love and charity... recognizing that not everyone can love or like you."

Stephen Colbert adds to the conversation:

"[02:53] Stephen Colbert: And also to see them in some of their hurt."

This segment underscores the Christian principle of loving one's enemies and understanding the underlying pain that fuels hatred.

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Interview with Stephen Colbert

How Fr. Jim Martin and Stephen Colbert Met

Maggie Van Doren initiates the conversation about their connection:

"[00:50] Maggie Van Doren: How do you know Stephen Colbert?"

Fr. Jim Martin recounts their first meeting:

"[00:51] Fr. Jim Martin: I was first invited on his show in 2007, the Colbert Report... he made me the official chaplain to the Colbert nation."

Stephen Colbert shares the origin of their relationship:

"[07:01] Stephen Colbert: I wanted to talk to someone about Mother Teresa... and that's how I've learned of Jim."

Stephen's Catholic Background and Personal Faith Journey

Stephen Colbert opens up about his upbringing:

"[11:00] Stephen Colbert: I was the youngest of 11 children in a very Catholic family... I was an altar boy for 11 years."

He further delves into his faith journey during his college years, describing a period of atheism sparked by personal tragedy:

"[27:21] Stephen Colbert: I became convicted of my atheism... lost 50 pounds, smoked a lot of weed... eventually found my way back to faith after a profound experience with a Bible on a bus."

Fr. Jim Martin reflects on similar experiences:

"[30:21] Fr. Jim Martin: ...I had a friend die when I was quite young... a kind of rebellion against the God that I was angry at."

The Intersection of Comedy and Faith

The conversation shifts to how Colbert's Catholicism influences his comedy:

"[17:07] Stephen Colbert: ...comedy happens in relation to somebody else... it’s about community."

He discusses the role of humor in processing tragedy and building connections:

"[19:55] Stephen Colbert: My mother used to say, 'See it in the light of eternity,' which helps in comedy..."

Fr. Jim Martin ties this to spiritual practices:

"[25:59] Stephen Colbert: ...examining your conscience... spiritual discipline."

Meeting the Pope: Stephen's Experience and Insights

Stephen Colbert recounts his encounter with the Pope:

"[50:59] Stephen Colbert: We were all excited to meet him... He gave a lovely speech about the heart behind our jokes."

He emphasizes the Pope's appreciation for comedy as a means of conveying deeper truths:

"[51:45] Stephen Colbert: The Pope said what I do is of value in a spiritual life."

Fr. Jim Martin expresses his admiration for the Pope's understanding:

"[55:45] Fr. Jim Martin: ...you have a beautiful vocation, you really help people laugh and enjoy the past."

Audience Question Revisited: Acting Towards Those Who Hate You

Returning to Karen's question, both Colbert and Fr. Jim provide insightful answers:

"[56:27] Fr. Jim Martin: ...pray to see the person the way God sees them."

"[56:52] Stephen Colbert: Examine your conscience honestly... love them regardless of how they feel about you."

This segment reinforces earlier advice, blending spiritual wisdom with practical steps.

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Conclusion

The episode wraps up with reflections on the shared journey of faith and humor:

Fr. Jim Martin praises Colbert's openness:

"[64:39] Fr. Jim Martin: I found it very consoling... people hear things that resonate with themselves and say, 'I'm not alone.'"

Stephen Colbert reiterates the value of faith in his life and comedy:

"[63:13] Fr. Jim Martin: ...being yourself and knowing that not everyone's going to like you."

The hosts extend their gratitude to Colbert, highlighting the meaningful exchange that bridges spirituality and the art of comedy.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Fr. Jim Martin on loving enemies:

  "[03:40] Fr. Jim Martin: 'Jesus says, we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.'"

• Stephen Colbert on compassion:

  "[57:26] Stephen Colbert: 'Everyone you know is going through a battle that you know nothing about.'"

• Fr. Jim Martin on spiritual receptivity:

  "[35:23] Fr. Jim Martin: 'The false self, this illusion of self is our achievements or even our relationships. But what is this thing that we are?'"

• Stephen Colbert on joy versus happiness:

  "[50:38] Stephen Colbert: 'I think joy is greater than happiness... joy can also come in moments of great sorrow.'"

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Final Thoughts

This episode serves as a profound exploration of how faith and humor intertwine in the lives of those who navigate both public life and spiritual growth. Stephen Colbert's candid revelations offer listeners a unique perspective on maintaining one's spiritual integrity while embracing the challenges and triumphs of a comedic career.

For more insights and episodes of The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J., visit America Media's website.

Transcript

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Hey, everyone. Fr. Jim Martin here. Before we jump into this episode of the Spiritual Life, I want to share an important piece of context. We recorded this episode just before the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo xiv. Welcome to the Spiritual Life. I'm Fr. Jim Martin. On this podcast, we reflect on how people experience God in their prayer and in their daily lives. And I'm joined by my producer, Maggie Van Doren. Maggie, good to be with you.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Good to be with you, Jim. And it's so exciting to be here, to be able to reflect deeply on the spiritual life and to have a front seat to these amazing conversations with our guests, not least of which is Stephen Colbert.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

We're very excited.

[Maggie Van Doren]

How do you know Stephen Colbert?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I was first invited on his show in 2007, the Colbert Report. The old one, right? The Colbert Report. And I was on a couple times and they made me the official chaplain to the Colbert nation, which I still get introduced as sometimes when I'm giving talks. He's just a great guy. He's a very faithful Catholic. He's a very deep person. You will find out. He is extremely articulate and knows his stuff. And he's also very funny, obviously.

[Maggie Van Doren]

So in addition to being incredibly well read and fantastically funny and sharp, Stephen Colbert currently hosts the Late show with Stephen Colbert on cbs. And as we mentioned before, that the Colbert rapport, which we do talk about a little bit in this conversation. And not only is Colbert a household name and, you know, the recipient of multiple Emmys, he is happy to talk about his Catholic faith and to do so quite openly. So it's an amazing conversation that we'll get to in just a minute. But first, let's get to our audience question. This question comes from Karen and she asks how should one act with people in one's life who do not love you and who instead seem to hate you?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, Karen, thanks for that question. It's a tough question, but it's a common one. I think everyone has people in their lives that dislike them or hate them. The first thing to do, of course, is to treat them with love and charity, which is tough. That's an act of mercy and it's sometimes an act of real penance. I think also to recognize that not everybody can love you or like you or approve of you. And so there's always going to be someone that dislikes you or even hates you. And it may not even be for something that you did. You can search your soul and turn over lots of different rocks and still not know what's going on, and sometimes asking the person, you know, have I done anything to upset you? Can really anger them. So giving them space, trying to pray, to understand them as God loves them.

[Stephen Colbert]

And also to see.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

See them in some of their hurt. Right. Usually people who are hating like that are hurting in some deep place from a psychological point of view. I think also, you know, if they're in any way abusive, you know, emotionally or, gosh, you know, certainly physically abusive, you, you know, need to take some distance from them. So there's that too. There's kind of self care as well. So it's, it's tough. It's a tough thing. But I think, you know, Karen, I'd like to say that everyone goes through that at different points in their life and to not feel so alone. This is a common experience. And, you know, Jesus said, interestingly, Jesus says, right, we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. And I heard a homily where the Jesuit priest said, jesus is presuming we have enemies, which was kind of a surprise to me. I thought, that's an interesting insight.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Right.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

He's not saying, oh, you know, we shouldn't have enemies. He's saying, no, love your enemies because you're going to have them. So I think it's part of life. And even Jesus understood that.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Yeah, hate seems like such a strong word. But I know I've had experiences where you meet someone for the first time and through no fault of your own, you rub them the wrong way and you're like, I don't know what I did or how I could be anything other than myself, but I don't feel, you know, enjoyed by somebody.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, I, you know, I've gone to therapy for a couple of years, and I know that therapists will say that, you know, you probably inadvertently remind them of someone. Yeah, you look like someone, you have the same voice, you have the same height, whatever, you, whatever. And you can't do anything. It just rubs the person the wrong way. And there's instant dislike or instant, you know, kind of discomfort. And I think, you know, you have to kind of come to understand the person as they are. But, you know, often the person doesn't give that same generosity to you and you can't do anything about it. I think part of it is also stop banging your head against the wall and trying to get this person to like you, because sometimes, again, that makes them even more angry at you. But, Karen, thanks so much for that question.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Yeah. And be sure to stick around because at the end of Stephen's conversation, we actually pose your question to him and both Jim and Stephen tackle it together. And if any of you would like to ask Father Jim a question, you can write to [e-mail].

[Fr. Jim Martin]

And now a word from our sponsor. Looking for a simple way to deepen your own spiritual life? Give Us this Day is a superb resource that helps Catholics stay rooted in both scripture and in prayer wherever you are, no matter how busy you are. It features both reliable and relatable spiritual reflections, the daily readings, essays on the lives of the saints, and of course, prayers to accompany you throughout the day. I'm honored to be an editorial advisor, and I've been writing a monthly essay called Teach Us to Pray from the very beginning, and I use it every single day. It's a great, great resource. And here's a great offer. Right now, listeners of the Spiritual Life can get 10% off their new print subscription. And I have to say, the booklets are beautiful. Just visit giveusthisday.org spiritual life and join our community of Catholics praying together again. That's giveusthisday.org spiritual life. And now, without further ado, onto our interview with Stephen Colbert. Well, Stephen Colbert, welcome to the spiritual life.

[Stephen Colbert]

Thank you, Jim. Pleasure to be here.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

And welcome Maggie, our producer.

[Maggie Van Doren]

So good to be here.

[Stephen Colbert]

Nice to meet you, Maggie.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Great to meet you.

[Stephen Colbert]

Maggie Van Doren.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Maggie Van Doren.

[Stephen Colbert]

Like Mamie Van Doren? Are you related to Charles Van Doren Doren?

[Maggie Van Doren]

I don't know who I'm related to.

[Stephen Colbert]

Okay.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

No, No E. No E. Yeah, there's no E. Okay.

[Maggie Van Doren]

There's no E. Right. So I'm really curious how you two met and how you enlisted Jim on the Colbert Report.

[Stephen Colbert]

Shall I or should I?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yep, feel free.

[Stephen Colbert]

Okay. So I have a great booker had at the Colbert Report, Emily Lazar, a real news booker, but also understood my character and what would play well off of him. And I was very interested in talking to someone about Mother Teresa. I think her looming canonization was coming and her diary had been released. And within it there were to some people very shocking revelations about her years of doubt about her faith. And I said, get me a priest I can talk to about this. I think it'd be a fun first act to talk about, maybe an unusual first act for a late night show to talk about. And I'd made my character's Catholicism, which is one of the few things I did the show in character. One of the few things that the character and I had in common was we both love Tolkien and we both are Catholics, because I cannot remove that from me any more than you can remove the marble from a statue. That's just who I am. And she said, oh, Jim Martin, Father Jim Martin. I said, okay, I'll go check him out. And I go home that night, and on my bedside table is a book. And it was one of your books. It might have been. Did you do, like, a Lives of the Saints?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

My Life with the Saints.

[Stephen Colbert]

Yeah, My Life with the Saints. I think it might have been that. My Life with the Saints. And I went, what do you know? Here I come home, I've never heard the man's name in my life. And I come home, and there's Jim Martin's book that I put on my bedside table based on its title. And so that's how I've learned of Jim. And then you came on the show. What was your experience?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Oh, we had a ton of fun. Yeah. I had just done an op ed in the Times on Mother Teresa, and so I was kind of primed to talk about it, and I was a big fan. And so I get this phone call, like, would you like to be in the Colbert Report? I was like, oh, let me check my calendar. Yes. And I found it interesting because you said to me, you probably said this to all your guests. I mean, I knew the character, treat me like I'm an idiot.

[Stephen Colbert]

Treat me like I'm a same thing to every person, which is, he's an idiot. He's willfully ignorant of what you know and care about. Please honestly disabuse me of my ignorance, and we'll have a great time. Which is my way of saying I'm embodying what is a serious argument among some and a strawman argument among others. And so I have to take it seriously as a character. But to you, it'll seem like a straw man argument. Please, please don't let me get away with it is what I say to my guests. Because I would. I would get away with it. Sometimes it would break my heart if I could beat my guest. I didn't want to.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, I loved it. I mean, I also. It was great evangelization. I mean, I can say that now, you know, because I would reach more people with a, you know, three minute, four minute hit on your show than I would in a year of homilies or. Right. So we did a lot.

[Stephen Colbert]

You ended up being the official chaplain of the Colbert Nation.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yes. Which I, by the way, as when I do talks around the Country. I still get introduced as that, by the way. Still out there someplace, Jim. It's out there someplace. Anyway, so thanks for that. It was a great honor.

[Stephen Colbert]

Oh, my God. And after that, we just hit it off like a house of fire. And I always like talking to Jim and. And you introd Metallica?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yes. You know, I got in trouble with that. Do you know that?

[Stephen Colbert]

No.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

There is a meme out there. So I have. I had fun, and I. I introduced Metallica and I put up the, like, the devil horns or whatever. So now that's used as a kind of, you know, by the far right and the rad, tragic show that you're. I'm like a Satanist.

[Stephen Colbert]

You're a false.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I'm a Satanist. And so that's what, you know, so.

[Stephen Colbert]

Look who.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Look who. Pope Francis appointed to the dicaster for communication. That's the picture. It's terrible. But you know what? It was worth it to introduce Metallica.

[Stephen Colbert]

By the way, do you know this isn't devil horns.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

What is it for Metallica?

[Stephen Colbert]

This is from Ronnie Dio. This started in metal. What people see as the horns. Ronnie Dio is. This is a blessing. It's a blessing he got from his grandmother. He's an old Italian family, and he was blessing the audience, like, bless you. Oh, that was what it meant.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

People were like, it's devil horns.

[Stephen Colbert]

That's not how Ronnie Dio meant it at all.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Is Ronnie Dio from Metallica?

[Stephen Colbert]

No, no, Dio had his own. It was. Dio was his band, and he was, you know, before those guys.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Okay, well, that's good to know. Now I can. Thank you. Now I can respond.

[Stephen Colbert]

Yeah, there you go.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

That meme has followed me for the rest of my life. It'll probably be in my obituary anyway. So you said you can't take out your Catholicism from who you are. Let's talk about that. So your family Catholic growing up?

[Stephen Colbert]

Yes.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Very Catholic.

[Stephen Colbert]

Yes, very Catholic. One of 11 children. I'm the youngest. All Saints, James, Edward, Mary, William, Margaret, Thomas, John, Elizabeth, Paul, Peter, Stephen. Wow. Yeah. They were almost out of names, almost out of saints. That's why they had to have a copy of books.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

It's like the Litany of the Saints. That was almost Swithin's Swithens. I don't think Swithin's called.

[Stephen Colbert]

I was almost Christostel.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Catholic schools growing up.

[Stephen Colbert]

No, I grew up in South Carolina, and there really weren't. My brothers and sisters went to Catholic schools. A sister's Sacred Heart, and my mom was Sacred Heart as well. My father was Jesuit educated. I was the only one in my family who didn't have Catholic education. I kind of wished I had it. Not so much to have the Catholic education, but I wanted to be like my brothers and sisters. I'm the youngest. I wanted to be like them. So I wanted to have the experience of the priests and the nuns and that kind of thing. Instead, I was an altar boy for 11 years. That was like. I needed to somehow, like, do the thing that my other brothers and sisters didn't do. So I was an altar boy forever.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

How about. You were at Northwestern, right? How were you active in, like, campus ministry in the Shield Center?

[Stephen Colbert]

I went to the Scheel Center a couple times. I didn't really like their crucifix.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Why not?

[Stephen Colbert]

I'm an aesthete, you know, that really gets in the way.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, most of our viewers, I think.

[Stephen Colbert]

It'S, please forgive me, whoever is the priest of the Shield center now is that. I think it's a wire frame. Jesus, and there's a cross behind him, but he's kind of reaching out toward us. And I'm like, no, I really am not looking to the crucifix for the victory. I'm looking to the crucifix for the suffering. Because that's when I need. The crucifix is in the suffering, and then the victory comes all the time. But I don't really. I really don't want the crucifix to be a promise that there is something on the other side of this. I really just don't want to be alone in my suffering. And then that is already a promise. What do we most want to be not alone? God came down. God became one of us. God suffered, died and was buried, not suffered death and was buried. I'm not a fan. You know, the new translation, it took away one of the things. He suffered, died and was buried. That's the old catechism. That's the old. That's the old creed. Now it's suffer death. And it was buried. I'm like, listen, you suffer, then you die. And listen, if you just suffer death, that would have been great. The passion is the suffering and then the death and then the buried. Please do something, Jim. I do like. Lord, I am not worthy to receive you under my roof. But only say the word and my soul shall be healed.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

That I do better. By the way, when I was growing up, there was a church nearby in Plymouth Meeting where on the outside. You'll love this. There is a I shouldn't laugh. And I forget the name of the church. There was a crucifix where Jesus, one hand was coming off the cross and offering you a dove. And I just. I just said, oh, yes, and it's probably still there. And I just thought, first of all, that looks really painful. And second of all, you know, like, let's just keep the crucifixion, like, as the crucifixion. And as far as I know, in the Gospels. He doesn't do that in the Gospels.

[Stephen Colbert]

Exactly. And here's another one, is that. Have you ever read Name of the Rose by Roberto Eko, which is, you know, great cast in the movie. Not a great movie. The book is wonderful. It is. It kind of is. Got the reputation of kind of a beach read, like murder mystery. It's not. It is extremely deep. So in the Name of the Rose, there's an argument about certain. There's a lot of infighting between different orders of the Catholic Church, like the Franciscans versus the Dominicans. Dominicans and the Cistercians or whatever. And one of them, and I forgot who it is, is all fine with prosperity. And so they have crucifixes where Jesus has a coin belt. And evidently, this is a real thing, like in the Middle Ages, that Jesus has got one hand down, like, going, it's okay to make money. Like, he's touching his coin belt. And I love that idea that this argument over what does Jesus want you to take from the image of the cross is an ancient one.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, I mean, it affects people. One of the ones I was surprised at, by the way, the Name of the Rose was the only book I'd ever read on religious orders before I entered the Jesuits. That was my idea of what religious.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Life was like a murder that.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Oh, it's. They're all nuts.

[Stephen Colbert]

I mean, some of it's crazy. Crazy. There's murders, there's sex. Yeah, there's sex, there's overeating, and there's a labyrinth.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I don't remember that. It's a great.

[Stephen Colbert]

The library is a labyrinth. Like, you go in.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah.

[Stephen Colbert]

Lost in the library. And the whole thing is about. Spoiler. The whole thing is about this one monastery has the only extant copy of Aristotle's Treatise on Comedy.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Oh.

[Stephen Colbert]

And the people who are in control of this do not believe that Aristotle's Treatise on Comedy should be released because it would legitimize comedy in the way that Aristotle's Treatise on Drama had legitimized drama. And because Aristotle was, you know, was the Philosopher. So they hide the book so no one can ever know. Because at no point in the Gospel does it say that Jesus laughed. Says he cried, but he didn't laugh, and therefore comedy could not possibly dovetail with the intention of Christ.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Now, do you remember the whole thing with the people licking the pages? You want to talk about that? Because that's how they prevent people from reading it. Right.

[Stephen Colbert]

Is that the book? The edges of the book are poisoned. Oh, so as you lick your finger to turn the pages, you're slowly poisoning yourself.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

That's right.

[Stephen Colbert]

Isn't that nice?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Now, go ahead.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Well, you mentioned this bit about Aristotle and comedy. I'm wondering, do you think that Catholics should have a good sense of humor?

[Stephen Colbert]

What's the option?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, you do know Catholics who don't have a good sense of humor, I'm sure.

[Stephen Colbert]

Yeah, sure. I've talked to Bill Donahue before.

[Maggie Van Doren]

The question would be like, what about our Catholic faith lends itself to a good sense of humor, even if it's not explicitly stated in the Gospels that Jesus laughed?

[Stephen Colbert]

Oh, gosh. I mean, I don't know if I can answer. I'll give you an answer. I don't know if it's the answer. I know that when something bad would happen in my life or anybody in the family, my mother would urge us to look at this the way God looks at it in the light of eternity. Try to look at this moment in the light of eternity, even in something like some precious thing that you lost. She's like, think of that in the light of eternity. What is that, really? And I think it helps as a comedian, and I think a lot of people who have suffered, like, had a rough life or suffered tragedy. I don't want to make too much of that equation that that makes you a comedian, because a lot of people suffer and do not become comedians. But I think that's often a component of it, is that that knocks you out of your normal context, especially if you're young. It knocks you out of the normal context of the people around you, normality being the majority. It knocks you out of how most of the people around you are seeing any given situation because you've had some enormous blow in your life. You've been struck in some way. The way I think of it is you click back once and click up a little bit. So you look at a situation slightly differently than the people around you and allows you to see maybe different forces in the moment. It allows you to deconstruct the moment. And a lot of jokes are deconstructive and so you're making jokes about. Well, from a different point of view, just to put it simply. Now, to say, try to perceive something in the light of eternity is automatically saying, you must see everything in a different. Outside of your mortal perspective. Take yourself out of it for a second. How about that? Take yourself out of it for a second and try to see this moment with clarity. Now, how does that lead to comedy? I don't know, but I think that's related to comedy. What is the John Agee book with the great photographs?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Oh, let us now praise Famous Men.

[Stephen Colbert]

He says the goal should be to see life for all its cruel and radiant beauty. And that. I think that's in the crucifix. To see the cruel and radiant beauty of that moment.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

That's beautiful. Thank you. You've spoken before about the tragedies you suffered when you were a boy. Did that perspective. And can you talk about that with our listeners? And did that perspective help you then, or is it more of an adult perspective?

[Stephen Colbert]

I mean, I certainly started paying attention to my mother saying, see this in the light of eternity after I had been struck by the death of my father and two of my brothers when I was 10 years old in a plane crash. And so they died on September 11th of all days, September 11th, 1974. Eastern Airline, Flight 212. And that's a number I see everywhere I look. That number is everywhere. And here we are in area code 212 doing this recording. And they died instantly in this plane crash. And so one day, with this enormous house full of noise, my dad, my mom, Peter, Paul, me, my brothers Tommy and Jay were home from college. My sister Lulu's going off to college. So this is in September. So Bill goes off to law school. I think Margo had just gotten married. So that's 10 people in a home. And in the course of just a few months, it goes from 10 people to me and mom, and that's it in the home. So, you know, I ended up paying close attention to her because I was. I think I've probably. I might even said this to you before, Jim. Kind of the joke is my mom and I had with each other is that after 10, I raised my mom because she was so struck that all she could do was just keep moving forward. And children are resilient. And anything that happens to you as a child is the normal thing that happens to children because you don't have.

[Maggie Van Doren]

You don't know any different.

[Stephen Colbert]

You don't have a context now that gives you a Different context from the other people, other kids around you. I stopped studying. I stopped playing with them in the same way. I read a lot of books. I quit sports. I just read a book a day. That's what I did. I already cared about comedy. I really liked. Big Irish Catholic family, big humorocracy. You wanna be the funniest person in the room at any one moment, and you're probably not gonna beat that brother or that you're gonna try to get your licks in on whatever the joke is. To this day, when I'm with them, Evie goes, you're so quiet when you're around your brothers and sisters. And I'm like, well, yeah, they're so funny. I just want to hear what they have to say. And I sincerely just kind of fall back into being a kid around them. But anyway, back to that moment, and if I can remember, what your question was, is how did the idea of the light of eternity inform me when I was a child and I suffered this thing and did. I can't necessarily say that it consciously did anything for me at the time. I mean, because my mother was a daily communicant. It was just the two of us. I was a daily communicant, you know, So I would go with her to. There was a convent near us, down this dirt road, actually, near the Marine Resources center of South Carolina. And so I would go there, and there'd be nobody there. There'd be the priest, and there'd be a few nuns and one or two. There's not a ton of Catholics in South Carolina, and there'd be one or two people there. And then me. And I went to so many masses that I would do it with the priest.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

You mean actually, like, physically?

[Stephen Colbert]

I would, like, do all the gestures. I would do everything like that, you know, and much my sister was like, knock it off. Like, what are you doing?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Because, like.

[Stephen Colbert]

Because it's close to, like. I don't know. Can you get arrested for pretending to do the sacraments?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

You. I think it's. I think it's an impediment to ordination to pretend to do the sacraments. Well, I was. I think they would.

[Stephen Colbert]

That's why I didn't become a priest.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Because of the impediment to ordination, I'm sure.

[Stephen Colbert]

So I don't think I necessarily thought, like, okay, in the light of eternity, X, Y and Z will make me feel better right now. But it's certainly that if you're steeped in that, then that just. That colors your view of everything. Eventually, and I did, especially through reading a great deal of science fiction, which tends to be iconoclastic, I did begin to understand that we are all seeing things very parochial. Yes. Even if we don't bring God into it. We're seeing things parochially in the fact that we live on a planet. That we're seeing things because we have this gravity centric way of seeing things. That if I let go of a pencil, I know it's gonna go down. That is not true everywhere. Almost nowhere is that true. Because the vast majority of the known universe is vacuum. There's some hydrogen out there, but there's very little. There's only microgravity. And so by the time I got to college, I started doing this trick where I would train myself to not know what will happen. For instance, I could hold up like a piece of broccoli from my lunch. And then I would allow myself to forget that I know which way it's going to go when I let go. And I found that I would get this feeling. It was almost like a floating feeling, like a suspended feeling. And it was this very kind of like in the spine, almost like a chill up your spine suspended feeling. And I could feel the forgetting of which way gravity worked. And I'd let go. And I knew that I had done it right if I laughed.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Oh, interesting.

[Stephen Colbert]

Oh, of course it goes down. Because I would laugh.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Because you.

[Stephen Colbert]

Because you can't fool your laugh. You know what I mean? Your laugh is autonomic. And I would do all kinds of tricks like that. I was so enchanted by that idea that you could change the way you saw the world that I started doing these tricks with myself to see whether I could perceive reality. Not the map that I have in my mind of what was supposed to happen in reality. You know, the way you can get in your car and drive home and you go, oh, wait, I don't remember driving home at all. That's what I don't ever want to do. I mean, I know I do it, but that's. When I was a young man, I was determined to be able to turn on some mental or visual or really perceptual power so that I could actually see what was in the world for all its cruel and radiant beauty.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah, but it's about noticing, right? Kind of training yourself to notice, which I think is an important part of spirituality.

[Stephen Colbert]

Right. I mean, that's one of my. That's one of my favorite lines of all time from any movie, and it's from Lady Bird.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah.

[Stephen Colbert]

Is when Lois Smith who plays the nun, who's the college advisor for Lady Bird? Saoirse Ronan. She goes, well, you really love San Diego. So many things you describe with so much love. And she goes, well, I don't know about that. I mean, I pay attention. And the nun says, don't you think they might be the same thing?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

That's a great attention.

[Stephen Colbert]

Love.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, and it's also. It's very Ignatian, it's very Jesuit. Because part of the Jesuit tradition is paying attention to your day and looking at the day as it's passed. Right. And just because we don't. I mean, as you say, we tend to go through our days the way that you're describing people driving to work, which is you just sort of forget about what's going on.

[Stephen Colbert]

And that can be a good day.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah.

[Stephen Colbert]

Because sometimes you need them. You do, yeah.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

It doesn't sound like you were a kid who, as a result of those tragedies, sort of moved away from religion or had a rebellious time or didn't go to church. Were you always all the way through?

[Stephen Colbert]

No, I sure did.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Did you? When was that?

[Stephen Colbert]

I stayed an altar boy. That was kind of like. Because that was something to do. I mean, I'm not going to. I wasn't going to go say to my daily communicant mother, I'm not going to go to Mass. And I also didn't feel a need to not go to Mass. I didn't feel rebellious in that regard. I had my safety valve of my science fiction and my fantasy, which is where I raced away from my responsibilities and my schoolwork, though I didn't perceive it that way at the time. And then I had being an altar boy, being an acolyte on the weekends, which was something. And made Mass more fun. It made it active, sure, because I got to see backstage, you know, and. But then when I went to college, out of that context, I immediately became convicted of my atheism. Not agnosticism. Absolute. And I was not happy about it.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

You were not happy about what?

[Stephen Colbert]

My atheism. I was not happy about the.

[Maggie Van Doren]

How did that happen?

[Stephen Colbert]

I don't know. You leave your home context, especially one that was emotionally rich and related to a tragedy that you wish hadn't happened. I think I never saw myself as mad at God. You know, my mother gave me a lesson of not being bitter, but the world didn't make a lot of sense to me, and I didn't see the hand of God in preventing this terrible thing, and I had no conscious sense of that. I'm doing deconstruction here. That may not even apply to that young, that 18 year old, but I don't know. I immediately was sure that there was no God. And I went to church once when I was a freshman and then I went to church once or twice when I was a junior. But it was bad. I went into a deep. I lost 50 pounds, I didn't eat, I didn't sleep very well. I smoked a lot of weed and I did pretty well at school because there was nothing I didn't do anything other than get high and read because I loved reading. Matter of fact, I stopped getting high because it was getting in the way of my reading. Wow. And I was like, no, I don't want to do that anymore. Because the Real Soulsies was reading. And so I stopped actually and just started reading. And I got good grades, but I was absolutely green. I remember my brother Ed coming to get me. He was so worried about me. Me, my brother Billy did it a couple times too. Picked me up from college because they were in D.C. and I was in Virginia and picked me up and took me back to his house just to fat me up for the weekend because I was so skinny. I was just, I. You could count my ribs.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I think there's also, I mean, I had it not with my family. I had a friend die when I was quite young when I was in college and I stopped going for about six months to a year. I think the other thing was it was kind of cool to be an atheist, to be an agnostic, like. And I actually said, when my friend died, I thought, well, you know, what kind of a God does this? I don't want to believe in this God. And so I'm not going to church. And that was kind of cool. I'm cool. I'm an atheist. I'm an intellectual. And, you know, made my Sundays a lot freer. I could, you know, get drunk and sleep in. And I think a lot of people go through that stage in their life, if not because of tragedy, then because of, you know, bad church or problems with the church. But for me, it was a kind of rebellion against the God that I was angry at.

[Stephen Colbert]

Oh, that makes a lot. That makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, I didn't really have. When I was first in college, I didn't have an intellectual crowd that I was trying to run with. Like it was. There was. That was no appeal for me. I would love to have continued to believe. I was very upset about it. So when did you come Back wasn't until I graduated. It was in the fall of 1986.

[Maggie Van Doren]

And what brought you back?

[Stephen Colbert]

I mean, I never stopped caring. And I never, you know, I say atheist because I was upset. If I was an agnostic, I don't think I would have been as upset. That's why I think I was an atheist. Do you know what I mean? If I was agnostic, like, well, maybe I'm wrong. I was absolutely sure that I was right.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Opposite of love, not hate, but indifference.

[Stephen Colbert]

Yes, and say that again. I love that. Say that again. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. That's interesting. So anyway, I still thought about it and I still took a lot of philosophy and I still read things associated with my faith. So anyway, I'm walking down the street, I've just graduated and I'm walking down the street in Chicago and it's really cold. There were Gideons giving out New Testaments, proverbs and Psalms. Little green like leather or faux leather bound books with a little pebble finish on it and little gold on it. And they're small, you know, they're about a pack of playing cards. And I remember it was so cold that whatever residual moisture had been in the paper and wherever it was packaged had frozen it shut, like you couldn't open it. And I had to hit it on my knee hard to crack open the book. And I was desperately depressed. I was in terrible shape. Couldn't figure out how to get out in the bed in the morning. And I flipped it open and there was the suggestions of, like, how are you feeling this way? Read this. And it was anxiety. And I went, oh, okay. Matthew, chapter five, which I think starts with. And Jesus goes up into a. Seeing the crowds, Jesus goes up onto a mountain and starts preaching to them. And then I think the Beatitudes are really early on, right? And what am I asking you? You're a Catholic priest. You don't know.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I'm not a Protestant. What do you think?

[Stephen Colbert]

So anyway, I read the sermon and it struck me so profoundly. I love the origins of Words and I have Brewer's Dictionary phrase and fable and all that kind of stuff. And the phrase it spoke to me came to mind as I was reading it because there was no effort in reading, was speaking off the page to me. I wasn't doing anything. There was no reader, there was no book. I was being spoken to directly by Christ. I say now at the time, I was just stunned by how easy it was to take it in and how true it all felt. To me. And I was struck, like, wow, this is really speaking to me. I'm not doing anything. And I just kept turning the page. And shortly thereafter, I lost that little Bible. And I was on a bus going down to one of my waiting jobs in Chicago, like, just maybe a week later. And I was really missing because I was reading the Gospel all the time. And. And there was a girl next to me on the bus, and she was reading a different version. It wasn't quite the same. And I said, oh, I had one of those. And I lost it a week ago. She goes, here, take mine. And it's still. I still have it.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

How is that? Beautiful.

[Stephen Colbert]

And I carry it everywhere with me. I carried it to work today. It has been in every bag, because I know a little backpacker bag. It's been in every backpack or bag that I've ever carried since I was 22 years old.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

That's great.

[Stephen Colbert]

And I still have her edition of it. I don't know who she is, but her underlines of the Gospel and her notes and her, like, references to how this refers to other things in the letters of the apostles and everything are still in there. And I. And I love it. And sometimes I don't even read it. I just, you know, that it's there.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

What was the. So what was the ver. What were the verses that spoke to you with the Beatitudes?

[Stephen Colbert]

So I say to you, do not worry. For who among you, by worrying, could change a hair on his head or at a cubit to the span of his life? Consider the lilies. They do not so they do not weave. Yet not even Solomon and All Splendor was raised one of these.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

It's amazing that, you know, I. I hear stories like that. Not exactly like that, of course, but people at vulnerable moments. Right. And it sounds like you were open. Right. My sense is that a lot of people.

[Stephen Colbert]

I had almost no self. Right.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

And. And I think some people say, well, oh, I was vulnerable and struggling, and then I found God. But I think it's, in a sense, God is able to break in more easily because your defenses are down. Right. And that. So, you know, God's always kind of knocking on the door, but we have these walls up. So when you're vulnerable like that, you're more able to feel it, which is very beautiful.

[Stephen Colbert]

The walls that we put up to define what we consider ourself. Merton talks about the bandages we wrap ourselves in. Yes.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

You know, the false self.

[Stephen Colbert]

The false self, this illusion of self is our achievements or even our relationships. But what is this thing that we are? Which, of course, is incredibly resonant for me with what Robert Bolt is saying in A Man For All Seasons, which is. That's really a play about the self. He goes, people have seen this as like a Catholic play. He goes, I'm not a Catholic. I'm not even a meaningfully sensitive Christian. But I am interested in what is it that is you, what is yourself? Is there anything that is you in you, that is not your appetites, but is merely you, a place from which you cannot retreat. Now, that reminds me, of course, of the Hound of Heaven. I fled him down the nights and down the days. I fled him through the labyrinthine ways of my own soul. I hid from him under running laughter. Ah, such good stuff. And then the hound gets him. He can't go any further. He's at that moment of weakness, he can't go any further. And he's fleeing the Hound of Heaven. And he hears the voice finally, of the hound. And the hound says, do you remember what he says? Thou dravest me, O fondest, blindest, weakest. It is I whom thou seekest. Thou dravest love from thee who dravest me. Fantastic.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

It's amazing how God works through our lives. But one of the questions I have, this is a very deep spiritual question, is what enables us to be receptive to that? Because another person would be in that situation. Look at that Bible, open it up, maybe read the same thing, maybe feel that connection and then push it aside. There's a choice involved. But I've always found that really interesting. I had an experience where someone said to me they were at a baptism. This is someone who'd been away from the church for a long time. And they said, the strangest thing happened to me. I was at this baptism, and when the priest started to pour the water over the baby's head, I had this incredible feeling of sort of emotion and desire, and I started to cry. Now, to me, that sounds like God kind of inviting you.

[Stephen Colbert]

The metanoiac experience.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, yeah, just almost like what you had, like this for her was at that moment. And I said, that's. That's beautiful. And she said, I was just being emotional, and so that was that. So there's kind of a choice involved whether you say yes or no. I mean, you know.

[Stephen Colbert]

Well, what does being emotional mean?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Right, exactly.

[Stephen Colbert]

Where's that coming from? Why are you being emotional? What is it? What are you responding to?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, and I said, did you ever consider that this might be the way that God has of inviting you to kind of a closer relationship or sort of inviting you back. Now he's just being emotional, you know, it's, it's saying yes. I mean, Jesus, you know, says, come, you can say yes or no. So even in your vulnerability there's a, there's a kind of agency because you, you could have said no to that. But it's, that's so beautiful.

[Stephen Colbert]

But I was alone. I was feeling alone. I think it, I cannot speak, of course, to this other person's experience at all, but I was alone. Literally alone on the street and cold and feeling lost. And I had studied a lot of different religions in my atheism. I had become very interested in commonality of confession, of like what each faith is professing here. And I was very like, well, they all lead the same place. You know, they're all wrong in their own way, I guess is what I would say. But they all lead the same place. But then when I had this experience, I thought, oh, this is so familiar to me. What is being said to me here is what is said to me as a child. And what is. I, I heard this message growing up and so I had the benefit of this being like home to me. It wasn't, it wasn't this, this wasn't some revelation that was coming like, you know, Paul on the road to Tarsus, where it just comes out of nowhere. This was familiar to me. And so there was also the homely quality of it and the solidity of that. A place where I could put my feet and they would be dry for a moment. And then I thought, well, I mean, I actually do think that so many of the world's great religions are trying to say the same thing. They're trying to approach a revelation that came to someone that led them to this message. I'm so far down the path of my own faith, why would I throw away everything that was given to me by my mother and my father and my ancestors and my preamble to this about all world faith. I'm not trying to engage in spiritual relativism here. I can't speak to the truth of other people's religions. I know what mine does for me and I know that most of the time it doesn't do it for me. I'm often in the valley, but I know what it looks like from the mountaintop and I believe that's a real experience. And I keep that real experience with me. And my faith is to get me to the next real experience of that so that I have clarity about my relationship with God. And I mostly do. But I do have clarity that the gift that was given me by my mother and father was one of love. It's not given to me as an oppressive system. It's not given to me as a tool of the patriarchy. It can be used as an oppressive system. It can be used as a tool of the patriarchy. The church is a human institution full of enormous flaws. As my mother and father used to say to me, that doesn't mean that it's not the bride of Christ. And so those revelatory moments of clarity that I've been lucky enough to experience get me through the darkness of my continuing loneliness.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah. And I think that's a common experience for people. They have these profound moments of grace. Right. Whatever it is, it's with the Gideon's Bible. It's on the bus. It's feeling that sense of Jesus talking to you. And by the way, you recognize that voice because you knew that voice. You know, the sheep know the shepherd's voice. Right. You, as you said you were familiar with it. But I think people have to sort of rely on these moments of consolation. St. Ignatius says when you have those moments of consolation, you store them up for times that. Like a squirrel with acorns, you know, for the times when you have desolation. So I think that's very common. And, you know, to come back to how we first met Mother Teresa, she had this tremendous experience, you know, where she physically hears Jesus's voice saying, you know, come work with the poor. And then she has nothing. And so she has to go off for 50 years on that, which I find just remarkable, you know, and she's, you know, she's nothing. And I talked to her biographer, and I said, now, you know, when that book came out, come be my light, the question was, is this just a long experience of darkness or is it her whole life? And he said to me, no, it's the whole life. So she has an experience of profound connection with God, and then she has to live on that. And so I think the kind of peaks and valleys is very common.

[Stephen Colbert]

Must have been a very profound experience.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Oh, it was. Well, she heard his voice. Yeah. That would keep me going for a while. But she struggled. I mean, as in that book, she struggles with that. You know, why am I not getting anything interiorly? We're gonna pause for a short break, but we'll be back in a minute. Let me ask you, day to day, what would you say your spiritual practices and prayer and whatnot.

[Stephen Colbert]

My work is not prayer. Okay. But it requires an enormous amount of focus that then you have to forget that you're doing. I have to be incredibly energized to do the show, but then I actually have to forget that I have energized myself. And I just have to have energy just to be on stage. Just have to, like. It has to be natural. It has to be like breathing, even though I've made a decision to do it. And there's a centering quality to it. Like, I'm solid. I'm solid right now. I can walk on. You can't push me over. It's one of the reasons why I like wandering around stage and I'll stand on one leg while I'm doing the monologue sometimes because I like the I'm an untippable teeter feeling. Being a little bit off balance is a fun way to feel when you're performing. So the first thing that occurs to me is, what is your spiritual practice on a daily basis? My spiritual practice on a daily basis is trying to understand how I feel about what happened in the world in the last 24 hours, and then talking with a bunch of very funny people about it, and then trying to understand their intention as they give me jokes back and how that might come in to get into one central thing. I don't mistake that for prayer. But that deconstruction of the day is like examining your conscience. And you can't be hypocritical. Or rather, it's best not to be hypocritical when you're making jokes about hypocrisy. And so you have to examine your conscience and go, okay, what role do I play in this terrible thing that happened today? Or what can I honestly make jokes about here? I mean, part of the spiritual practice is I won't make jokes about other people's tragedy, because that's sacred. That's a spiritual discipline, not an exercise. I suppose that's a spiritual discipline because I just don't want to do that to my soul. I have a lovely cross on my desk that a friend of mine, Jim Martin, brought back from Jerusalem for me. It's a Jerusalem cross, a square cross on my desk. It's right in front of my keyboard. I look at it all day long. I'm not praying, but I am looking at it. I'm thinking about my friend who gave it to me. I'm thinking about what the cross symbolizes. I have pictures of my parents. I talk to them, especially if I'm really lost on what the thing to say is here. I'll talk to my dad. I'll talk to his Holy cross portrait.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

And answer your questions or kind of.

[Stephen Colbert]

Yeah, yeah. What do I do here? What's the what. What do I do here? What do I. How do I say this? Especially if I have to speak to something that's not comedic, like a terrible school shooting or. There are things that I don't. I don't make jokes about other people's tragedy, but there are tragedies that you can't ignore if you do a show that's about what's happening in your country on a daily basis. So there are times when I have to write on things like that. And when I do that, I go by myself in a room and I put on a little music and I sit there for about an hour, and I often talk to my dad about it.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Do you feel like you get answers?

[Stephen Colbert]

Yeah, I do. I do not. A voice in my head sure like insights, but I think about my father's Jesuit educated worldview. I think about. I don't remember a lot of my father talking about the world as it is, you might say, but I remember him saying, I mean, this is a man who never voted for one Democrat in his life other than Jack Kennedy. But he said, when I get to the pearly gates, I would rather have been thought a fool than not have helped the poor. Because people say, like, well, people are gaming the system. Sure, of course they are. Every. Every system has those flaws. I just don't want to be thought of as. As not having thought of the poor.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

The founders of the religious of Jesus and Mary, St. Claudine Thevenet, said, I would rather be cheated by nine people than to let the one truly deserving person go hungry. So it's the same thing.

[Stephen Colbert]

There you go. Fool.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Fool.

[Stephen Colbert]

Sure, it's the one. Sheep.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I would like to ask you a question that we've sort of skirted around comedy and faith and how they interact. Do you find being Catholic helps your comedy hinders you? What would you say?

[Stephen Colbert]

I don't know. I mean, it would really help my comedy if I were Jewish. That would be great. And I don't know how. I don't actually know how, but, oh, what a comedy community the Jewish people have. I mean, there were years ago when I got my DNA sampled, they said, oh, there's a 75% chance that you're Ashkenazi. I'm like, oh, that would be fantastic, fantastic. And they said, the other 20% is Irish. And I went, oh, that's kind of. I promise you it's going to be the Irish.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

But the Catholics have a lock on late night tv.

[Stephen Colbert]

They do, they do. I don't know how that happened, but, yeah, it's Jimmy. Jimmy and Stephen are the late night guys now. We're all Catholics. I don't know. I mean, it's kind of an Irish thing, maybe. I don't know if it's like, Catholic or whether it's Irish Catholic. There's a lot of Irish Catholic comedians.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah. Which I think is a kind. I'm half Irish. It's a kind of dark humor.

[Stephen Colbert]

I love. You know, I don't know if I've ever said this to you before. I was just at Trinity College, Dublin, speaking to the Philosophical Society there. And, yeah, I'm pretty fancy, Jim.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Very.

[Stephen Colbert]

And I was given the Golden Medal of something or other.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Something or other of Aragorn, the Golden.

[Stephen Colbert]

Medal of Honorary Patronage. And they've been giving out the award for, like, 350 years. It's great. And I said, what? I just love being here. I just wander in Ireland. I just feel at home. I drink dark beer, I sing songs about troubles I never had and hard labor I never did. And I love the Irish because the Irish, I mean, you guys are sad. You guys are sad and you're funny, and best of all, you're funny about being sad. You know, like, the Irish not only can love with a broken heart, but kind of love the broken heart, which is just wonderful. And so I think. I mean, comedy people often become comedians in response to tragedy. And I think the, you know, Catholics, Protestants. Protestants are great, you know, but I like the Catholic crucifix more than the Protestant cross because there's the suffering, you know, there's love in the suffering. You love the cross, he loves you. It's all channeled through this moment of inexpressible agony. And, you know. Yeah, dark humor. But all humor comes out of, like, uncomfortableness, I think, in some way. And if that's a loving central part of your spiritual life is the death of God, I mean, that's. That's.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I mean, when you put it that way, it is pretty. It is pretty sad.

[Stephen Colbert]

It is pretty sad, but it's also. But it's also not the end.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

That's true.

[Stephen Colbert]

Know, it's loss, but not defeat, which is a really very important distinction. Dua Lipa asked me this. How. She asked me this question. I said, well, I think, you know, there's something. There's happiness, and then there's joy. And I think joy is greater than happiness. I want everybody to be happy. I want my kids to be happy. But joy, that sublime feeling of joy, can also come in moments of great sorrow, strangely, because you're sharing it with other people. Comedy doesn't happen by itself. You know, comedy always happens in relation to somebody else. What do we most want to be? Not alone. And if I tell a joke and you end up laughing at it, that means you understood something that came out of my mind. You understood my point of view on something. And that's. That's.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Whoa.

[Stephen Colbert]

That's community. And I think that starts with the communion we have for Catholics. I'm not saying for everybody, this is not a universal thing. But you're saying, how did that possibly influence my comedy? I don't make a joke about anything, but I could make a joke about anything, because God can die. Anything is possible.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

What was it like to meet the Pope?

[Stephen Colbert]

It was great. It was great. It was a little surprising. Well, first of all, you know, originally I told you this later. Is that when you sent me, hey, how would you like to meet the Pope? You know, I've been asked by, you know, the de castrate for culture and education, which I had to look up what that was. The de castrate for culture of Education, like, to help put together a list of comedians who might want to come meet the Pope. Pope wants to meet some comedians. I'm like, okay, yeah, sure, that'd be great. And in my mind, I'm like, yes, that's gonna be like 10 comedians meeting the Pope. I didn't know.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I thought.

[Stephen Colbert]

I didn't think we were gonna be hanging with the Pope. I thought that we'd probably meet some people from the dicastery, have like, a little afternoon talking about comedy, something like that. And the Pope would come in for a photo op, and he would leave. It was 140 comedians from all around the world, 58 of whom were from.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Italy, 67 from Italy. Italy.

[Stephen Colbert]

And they're just not that much funnier than we are. Jim.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Italy is apparently six times as funny as American comedians.

[Stephen Colbert]

And then we all got in the room, we were all excited to be there. None of us were too cool. That's what was interesting thing, is that comedians are iconoclasts by nature. And I said this. I think I said this to Gaffigan or maybe Mike Birbigli when he was on the show, because we were talking about the visit. And I said, you know, what really surprised me is that by nature, comedians are Iconoclasts. And I love shaking my fist at authority. And the Pope came in and we all leapt to our feet and we screamed like he was the Beatles. And I literally thought to myself, I was doing it. I was like, what are we doing? How is this happening right now? But we all did. And then he gave that lovely speech, which I found out what he actually said later. The lovely speech about, you know, sure, you can make, you know, jokes about God, you can make jokes about the church and everything like that. It's all what you do, what's in your heart when you do it. Which reminds me, reminded me of C.S. lewis's screwtape letters, where Screwtape is writing to Wormwood about how to get the client, which is us, to the Infernal Father and away from the enemy, who is God. And he goes, now, I understand that your client is laughing a lot with his friends. Don't think this is gonna help you necessarily. There are four things that elicit laughter. One is joy. We can't really understand what this is. It's too close to that music that plays in heaven that they call love. This will not help you. There's play. This is related to joy. It is of no use to you. This excites affection between those who do it. And this will put an armor against our infernal Father. Do not encourage this. There's the joke proper. The joke proper seems like it would be useful to you because perhaps your client makes jokes about virtue. But even a joke about virtue requires intellectual strength. It is difficult to make a joke about anything, let alone virtue. And this intellectual strength is a gift from the enemy and it does not help us either. Do not encourage this because it sharpens the mind to make the joke proper. Now, flippancy, this is where you will succeed. Because in flippancy, no actual joke is made. An actual attitude is struck that a joke has been made and everyone laughs to be part of the in crowd. This is the finest armor against God that I can imagine because it dulls the senses, it dulls the wit, it dulls the intellect, and it excites no affection among those who exercise it. Encourage this whenever possible.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

And there was no flippancy in that room. People were pretty, you know.

[Stephen Colbert]

No, they weren't. You were.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I mean, is it fair to say you were the 10 year old altar boy again, excited to see the Pope? Was there a sense of that, like, I can't believe I'm with the Pope? Cause that's what I felt when I first saw the Pope.

[Stephen Colbert]

I Mean, Lulu and I, my sister Lulu, were like, how happy would mom be now?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

It was all kind of like we.

[Stephen Colbert]

Were there for ourselves and for our own. For our own interests and needs. But also, come on. Like to say to my dad, who never knew what I did with my life. You know, my mom was very thrilled with my career, never knew what I'd do with my life. My father didn't like live theater. I know he kind of liked Johnny Carson, you know, but to be able to say to my Jesuit educated dad and go, like, yeah, you know, what I do is a little odd, and it can be a little rough at times. And maybe not everybody likes some of the jokes that I make about Jesus or about my church or something like that. And I said, but whatever I did got me to this room. And that guy in the white up there says that what I do is of value in a spiritual life. I'm gonna hold on to that one. I'm gonna hold on to that for a while. It was a really lovely gift. Plus the pasta.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

The pasta is great. But also, I thought it was wonderful that, you know, I was thinking, how often do comedians and comics get told that you have a beautiful vocation, you know, you really help people laugh and by the past. And that talk was lovely.

[Stephen Colbert]

It was. It's really important for comedians that they have no respectability. I want. The respectability is death. Like, you really can't. You shouldn't have respectability, and you shouldn't actually give a damn what any authority says about you. I mean, some comedians out there were really mad that we went like it was. There was. I know there was people mad, like, how. What the hell are you doing? And I totally respect that opinion. Matter of fact, we shot a documentary of it going over there that we're still working on. I want to talk to those people and go, hey, no, totally.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah.

[Stephen Colbert]

I want to hear. Because we shouldn't, as comedians ever be told that what we do has value.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Now. Yes. Audience question. Then we'll let you go.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Okay. So, Stephen, we occasionally take a question from the audience, hoping that you can help us tackle it. And I think this will dovetail nicely with what you've been talking about in terms of, like, being liked or disliked in the world. So. So this question comes from Karen, and she asks, how should one act with people in one's life who do not love you and who instead seem to hate you?

[Stephen Colbert]

I would say the first thing would be to examine your conscience and say, what role do I play in this? Now you have to examine your conscience honestly. Because what you don't want to do is give heft to a false accusation against you for your behavior. But if you can honestly look and say, if you can say my side of the street is clean, then you have to find a way to love them, regardless of how they feel about you. Because your hatred of them will only enslave you. It won't do a damn thing to them.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Jim.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah. I'd say, you know, something similar to what your mom would say. Right. Get some perspective. Look at this person the way God looks at this person. See if they're going through some struggles. Right. It's usually that, as they say, hurt people. Hurt people, yeah.

[Stephen Colbert]

Everyone you know is going through a battle that you know nothing about.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah. And that might mean that they're angrier at you. The second thing I would say is it is a recognition. It's an invitation to freedom from the need to be loved, liked, or approved of. Not everyone's going to like you now. That's harder if it's in your family or. But I live with a guy in the Jesuits who hated me. And I mean hated me. He didn't talk to me. And so I had to sort of say to myself, look, I, I, okay, not everyone's going to like me. And one of the great helps was an older Jesuit named John Dunny who worked at this magazine. He, when he was 90, he said, I can't believe they're making me retire. I'm only 90. And I went to John and I said, boy, this guy just hates me. And he said, you can always. I love this word. You can always be cordial to him. You can love him. You can't enter no conversation with him, but you can always be cordial. And it's a form of charity. But I, I think trying to pray to see the person the way God sees the person usually can help. And you see that person more as hurt. So it's tough, though. You're right. That's a tough thing to deal with. But, you know, Jesus dealt with it. I'll tell you one quick story.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Please.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I was on a retreat and we'll let you go.

[Stephen Colbert]

I like one quick story like he's going to recite the entire Gospel. Let's tell you one good story. The guy named Jesus.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

That's right. He was born. So I was on retreat during this whole process where this guy wasn't liking me. And I was praying over the rejection at Nazareth. So we know Jesus stands up in the synagogue at Nazareth and basically proclaims himself as the Messiah and they reject him and they drive him to the brow of a hill and they try to kill him, they try to throw him off the hill. Normally when you hear homilies on that, it is always, well, they didn't understand him because he was so familiar. And how often do we as Catholics, you know, reject the divine because it's too familiar. That's the normal trope, which is true. But in this meditation, I was thinking about Jesus and I thought, now he must have known Nazareth is 200 or 400 people. He must have known how people were going to react.

[Stephen Colbert]

He knew all of them.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

He knew all of them.

[Stephen Colbert]

Yes, exactly.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

So I said to him in my prayer, in this kind of contemplation, how were you able to do that? Like, how were you able to deal with the people hating you? And the words that I heard in prayer, not orally, but that came to me very clearly, were, must everyone like you? And I remember saying to my retreat director, well, yes, I mean, they. And she said, it's an invitation to let go of the need for everyone to love, like or approve of you. And that was very freeing. And then a couple years later, I started to do all this LGBT stuff and people really hated me. And so there's a freedom in trying to follow what Jesus did, which is being yourself and knowing that not everyone's going to like you. Now listen, everyone likes you at America Media. I'd like to thank you, our official late night talk show host of the spiritual life.

[Stephen Colbert]

Thank you. Thank you very much. It's an honor.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

We don't have a gold medal for that.

[Stephen Colbert]

Don't you dare make me respectable.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

That's right.

[Stephen Colbert]

It's not going to help. I'll tell you one more thing about respectability. I don't know if you ever read Mad magazine. We were younger, Mad magazine. William Gaines, who is the publisher of Mad magazine, and the usual gang of idiots, which was whatever it was called, who worked there, he said, it's very important that Mad Magazine never be published on shiny paper, like nice paper, like a Time or a Newsweek or something like that. It must always be on pulp paper because it should never be respectable. And that's why it was right before it ended. They switched over to a shiny paper where I was like, I know they're the best.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Doomsday. That's it.

[Stephen Colbert]

I knew they were doomed, but it's always, always pulp paper. So you can't. You. You really. To be able to look at something from another point of view, you can't actually accept the context. Respectability comes from context. You have to be able to stand outside of the context of your society and look at it from the side. And you know what? That's something that being a Catholic helps you do. And I'll tell you why. Look what's happening with our nation right now. Who knows what the next few years are going to bring. Seems like a fair amount of turmoil. Who knows? I could be wrong, hope I'm wrong. I actually want every president to be successful. It hasn't started off great. And God help us if the United States stopped existing because everything stopped existing eventually. If it stopped existing, my church would not. But what frightens me about knocking down the separation of church and state is not what it does to my country, as much as I don't want that to happen for my country, is that what it does to my faith is it's not getting religion in my politics, it's getting politics in my religion. And so if you're a Christian nationalist and the nation fails, sounds like you got a pretty bad Christ over there. Sounds like you got a weak Christ over there. You know what I mean? What does it say about the message of the gospel if a mere market fluctuation could damage the reputation of the Lord? Come on. That's why you have to keep a separation of church and state and that separated. In my mind, this is not a Catholic nation because the Catholic Church is not about nations. And that's one of the light of eternity, non respectability things that I expect because the church is not respectable. The church is eternal. They're different. And respectability comes from a cultural context of the moment. And it's important to not get caught in that trap, to try to see things in the light of eternity, not in the cultural context of the moment.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah, And God's above all that. I mean, Christ judges the nations. He's not part of them. Listen, thank you for your time. Thanks. I. I'm going to embarrass you. Thanks for being a public Catholic right now. I know you'll say, oh, I'm not a perfect Catholic. But you really are. You're one of the few people out there who maybe you would say perfect.

[Stephen Colbert]

Catholic, maybe you would say, there you go. No, I. Listen, I am publicly Catholic. I don't think I'm a public Catholic. I don't mind talking about it if my guest wants to talk about it. But that's not my. My job is like, I'll talk about what you want to talk about. That's One of the things I can talk about. I'm perfectly happy to talk about it. I'm actually very happy to talk about that, even though it's very difficult at times. But that's nice of you to say. Thank you. Not my goal as, again, it's just part of who I am, and the job is to go be yourself.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, we're glad it's part of who you are. And thanks for being our guest on the Spiritual Life. Stephen Colbert.

[Stephen Colbert]

Thanks so much. Lovely to meet you. Nice to see you again, Jim. Thanks.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Well, that was wonderful.

[Maggie Van Doren]

It was incredible. It was like the experience of a lifetime for me. I. I know that, you know, Stephen many years now. What was this conversation like for you, Jim? Did you hear anything different from Stephen or learn anything about him?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah, I found it very consoling. I was happy that he felt comfortable enough going deep with us and talking about the challenges of the spiritual life. One of the things I'm hoping for, and we're hoping for on this podcast is that people hear things that resonate with themselves and say, I'm not alone. I'm not the only one that feels this way. You know, like the peaks and valleys that he was talking about, that's very common. I was really moved by the story which I had heard in sort of pieces of the Bible and the Gideon Bible and kind of finding.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Was it Matthew 5?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah, yeah. And opening it up. And I just found that really profound. And, you know, it's a kind of truism of the spiritual life that, again, when you're vulnerable, God can break through. And I think it's not that God makes you go through difficult situations in order to bring you to God. Right. It's not like God punishes you or tests you, test you, or sends this awful suffering to make you. It's more that, as I see it, our defenses are down, we're more vulnerable, and God's always trying to get in. And it's just that when our walls are down and our defenses are down, God can get in more easily. And it sounded like. I mean, I didn't realize he was kind of, you know, at such a low ebb, you know, at that point in his life. And God was able to break in. So I found that very moving.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Yeah, I really appreciated that story that he told about the scriptures leaping off the page and, like, speaking directly to him. Do you find that's common in the spiritual life?

[Fr. Jim Martin]

I find it's very common. A person is in a particular situation and they're open to it. It's something like just having the experience of God. And it just hits them. And I think one of the things that's interesting is that it can be the most familiar line of Scripture passage from the Gospel thing that Jesus says, psalm. And it just hits you and you think, well, why am I so moved by this? I've read this hundreds of times. And so I find that happens to me on retreats a lot. You know, someone gives a passage I've read a million times. I'll tell you one that really moved me. It was the. Well, the story of the rich young man. And there's a. So, you know, the rich young man comes to Jesus and says, what must I do? And I think most of our listeners know it. And Jesus says, if you want to be perfect, go and sell what you have and give to the poor. And the guy goes away sad because he had many possessions. There's a line in there where it says, Jesus looking at him, comma, loved him, comma, and said. And I thought, oh, my gosh, where has that been my whole life? And I just thought about, you know, how God looks at us in love and invites us to do things that might sometimes be difficult. So that changed the whole.

[Maggie Van Doren]

It totally changed the whole thing.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Totally. Yeah.

[Maggie Van Doren]

Because it's not just about correction or the righteous, moral, ethical thing to do. It is always preceded and grounded in love.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah, it's about love. And so that happened to me recently on retreat. And I think the experience that he's describing, and for those people who are listening, it doesn't happen all the time. It's not like every time you open up a Bible, that's something that happens. Or every time you go to Mass, but pay attention to that. That God can speak through those moments when you really are struck by a gospel verse. So I found him very as he is often when he speaks about his faith, extremely articulate, very knowledgeable, Excited, too, and passionate.

[Maggie Van Doren]

It felt like an education just sitting here, you know, listening to all of the great literature that he has read and that has actually influenced his faith.

[Fr. Jim Martin]

Yeah. And I loved, in a sense, we heard the whole story of him from, you know, being a boy and going through that tragedy and in a sense, moving away from the faith in college, coming back to it, what is his. What is his practice now? So it was a sense, in a sense, a kind of, you know, Lifetime spiritual review from Stephen Colbert. And I was just grateful that he shared it with us. Well, we want to thank our guest, Stephen Colbert, and thanks to all of the listeners. The Spiritual Life with Father James Martin is a production of America Media. It's produced by Maggie Van Dorn and our executive producer Sebastian Gomes. We recorded in the William J. Loshert Studio in New York City with the production assistance of Kids Kevin, Christopher Robles and Grace Lenihan. Our audio engineer is Noah Levinson. Adam Buckmuller edited the video of this episode which will be made available on American Media's YouTube channel. The theme score is courtesy of Teddy Abrams and Nate Farrington. You can follow me across social media amesmartinsj. Also, please help us to grow the show by leaving a five star review on your favorite podcast platform. If you love the Spiritual life then we have even more to offer you on America Magazine's website. Keep informed and inspired about our Catholic faith and you can also read an article I wrote about this episode on our website. Become a subscriber today@amer America magazine.org subscribe or click the link in the show notes. Thank you you and God bless you.