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(NewsNation) — Just days before news broke that CBS News is canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” the titan of late-night comedy described his deep faith and its role in his life as a comedian on a religious podcast.

Stephen Colbert has been open about being a practicing Catholic, but he revisited his conversion story in a conversation with Father James Martin, S.J., Jesuit author and host of “The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.” 

Colbert described his upbringing as “very Catholic.” He said he was the youngest of 11 children. “They were almost out of names,” Colbert quipped. 

“I cannot remove [Catholicism] from me any more than you can remove the marble from a statue. That’s just who I am,” the comedian said. 

But what may come as a surprise to his fans is what attracts Colbert to Catholicism.

“I really am not looking to the crucifix for the victory. I am looking to the crucifix for the suffering. Because that’s when I need the crucifix, is in the suffering,” he said.

“What do we most want? Not to be alone. God came down. God became one of us. God suffered, died, and was buried,” the 61-year-old said.

Colbert described his faith as a “gift” passed down by his parents. And that gift, he said, helps him in his professional work as a comedian.  

“When something bad would happen in my life …  my mother would urge us to look at things in the light of eternity. … It helps as a comedian … that knocks you out of your normal context,” he said. “You look at a situation slightly differently than the people around you.”

Loss of father, brothers changed Colbert forever

“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,” Colbert said. 

“And so one day with this enormous house full of noise … in the course of a few months, it goes from 10 people to me and mom and that’s it,” the comedian described. 

The grief and loss brought Colbert and his mother close. So close, he says that Colbert’s mother didn’t raise him; he raised her.

“I mean because my mother was a daily communicant, and it was just the two of us. I was a daily communicant, you know,” he said. 

Colbert becomes atheist in college

Once Colbert got to college, the world didn’t make a lot of sense to him. 

“I immediately became convinced of my atheism,” he said. “And I was not happy about it.”

Colbert said he went to church a few times in college and entered into a dark period.

“I lost 50 pounds. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep very well. I smoked a lot of weed. I did pretty well at school. I didn’t do anything but get high and read. Because I loved reading. In fact, I stopped getting high because it was getting in the way of my reading,” he said.

Colbert describes ‘mystical’ journey back to faith

“I never stopped caring,” Colbert admitted. But he lost his faith and considered himself an atheist.  

And then one day, after graduating from Northwestern University, Colbert said he rediscovered his childhood faith in an instant. 

“I’m walking down the street in Chicago, and it’s really cold,” he remembers. “There were Gideons giving out New Testaments, Proverbs and Psalms.” 

“I was desperately depressed. I was in terrible shape. Really, just couldn’t figure out how to get out of 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. It was anxiety,” Colbert said.

He read the fifth chapter of Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount.

“I read the sermon and it struck me so profoundly,” he said. “It 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.”

Colbert says return to faith was coming home 

Colbert said that coming back to the Catholic Church was like coming home. 

“I can’t speak to the truth of other people’s religions,” he said. “I know what mine does for me, and I know that most of the time it doesn’t do it for me. But I’m often in the valley, but I know what it looks like from the mountaintop. And I believe that’s a real experience.”

Colbert had a practical approach when that spiritual reawakening took place.

“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?” he said.

For Colbert, the flaws of the church are the human failing of its members. 

“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.”

Colbert’s daily spiritual practices

“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 into one central thing. I don’t mistake that for prayer. But that deconstruction of the day is like is like examining your conscience.”

Colbert uses a cross to keep him grounded at work. 

“I have a lovely 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 of what the cross symbolizes,” he said,

Colbert says his faith helps his comedy

Colbert quipped that there’s a reason why there are many Irish Catholic comedians.

“Protestants are great, you know, but I like the Catholic crucifix more than the Protestant cross because there’s the suffering,” Colbert said. “There’s love in the suffering. You love the cross. He loves you. It’s all channeled through this moment of unexpressable agony. And you know, yeah, dark humor, but all humor comes out of uncomfortableness.”

For Colbert, the fact that Christ’s death is the center of the Catholic faith is deeply significant.

“It’s loss but not defeat,” he explained. “That sublime feeling of joy can also come in moments of great sorrow, strangely because you’re sharing it with other people.”

Colbert meets Pope Francis

Colbert described meeting Pope Francis with more than one hundred comedians, including Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien and Chris Rock in the Vatican in 2024.

“What really surprised me is that we’re 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,” he said.

What to do if someone seems to hate you? Colbert weighs in

“I would say the first thing would be to examine your conscience and say what role do I play in this?” Colbert said when asked for his advice on how to handle hatred or dislike from another person. “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.”

“Your hatred of them will only enslave you. It won’t do a damn thing to them,” he concluded.