Must See Video: Stephen Colbert and Patricia Heaton in a Catholic Throwdown

They went there last night, and the result was Catholic nerd-vana.

Watch. (h/t to Tony Rossi!)

My take: I know this isn’t the most pristine form of catechesis, and this doesn’t exactly rank up there with the Summa in terms of its penetrating insight into the nature of God.

But really: this is remarkable. And in this day and age, pretty surprising.

As I’ve noted before, you rarely see this sort of conversation on network television, and never from a star of Colbert’s wattage. (His eagerness to talk about things like Catholicism so unabashedly—his Joe Biden interview stands out as another eyebrow-raising example—may be one reason his ratings aren’t exactly shattering records.)  Colbert tends to like what one writer called “wonky” guests; he veers toward people like Stephen Breyer, Ban Ki-Moon, Malala Yousafzai and Archbishop Thomas Wenski.

Say what you will—and I know he’s not everyone’s cuppa tea—but Colbert is doing things no one else is. CBS deserves props for letting him, and for providing a home for conversation that is often sly and smart.  He’s not Johnny Carson, or even David Letterman. But he may be the 21st century’s Dick Cavett. And that’s something.

UPDATE: For those who are curious, it turns out Heaton has spoken in the past about her sister, who is a member of the Nashville Dominicans.   You may remember them from this piece. 

She’s a rarity in Hollywood: an outspoken conservative. According to this profile: 

Heaton was married to British actor David Hunt in 1990 and they have four sons. The family splits time between homes in Los Angeles and England, where they own a country estate. In 2002, she published a book about her life, Motherhood and Hollywood: How to Get a Job Like Mine. In it, she describes moving from Roman Catholicism to the more socially acceptable Presbyterianism. Although she and her family attend an Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Heaton claims she is still a Catholic.