Do You Remember: Madonna vs. the Catholic Church (and Pepsi)

Madonna just announced that she’s releasing her next studio album this Summer, and that it’ll be a sequel to one of her greatest works, Confessions on a Dancefloor. As a Madonna stan who first fell in love with her music as a pre-teen and who went to see her Celebration tour in Denmark in 2024, I couldn’t be more excited. I love her (her work as a filmmaker? Not so much.)

She may not be at the forefront of the zeitgeist as she once was, but she’s still the Queen of Pop. There’s a reason she is forever cited as one of the foundations of the genre. Any time 70% of modern pop singers do or say something, I have to resist the temptation to yell, “Madonna did it!” Check out the lion’s share of women performing at Coachella this year, and you’ll see Madonna’s influence in all of them: the cheeky self-awareness of Addison Rae, the intense club ferocity of FKA Twigs, the kitsch raunch and feminine supremacy of Sabrina Carpenter.

Speaking of Sabrina, the controversy her Man’s Best Friend album cover art inspired felt like another Madonna throwback. Indeed, it seemed like a rare instance of effective pop provocation in the 2020s. Societally, we are simultaneously stuck in a conservative-driven culture war of grievance politics yet not truly shocked by anything. Is that because Madonna (and Janet and the women of punk and Courtney and Jill and Sinead) already did it all? It’s easy to forget just how many feathers she ruffled, and how major the consequences were: from the Sex book to Toronto cops threatening to shut down her concerts to the Britney kiss. But none of it comes close to when an entire religious institution called for her punishment.

There are few things in the world funnier to me than Christian choirs singing “Like a Prayer.” I understand that some people have trouble with double-entendres and implications but there’s nothing subtle about that song. She’s not down on her knees in actual prayer, guys. But it is part of a very Catholic album. Madonna Ciccone grew up in an Italian-American Catholic home, largely raised by her father after the death of her mother. "Because in Catholicism you are a born sinner and you're a sinner all your life. No matter how you try to get away from it, the sin is within you all the time. It was this fear that haunted me; it taunted and pained me every moment. My music was probably the only distraction I had," she told Interview Magazine in 1989.

At the time, she was undisputably a star, with three hit albums to her name, but she was also in the midst of a career slump. The movie Who's That Girl and its accompanying soundtrack had not been hits. She'd received middling reviews for her Broadway debut in David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow. And her marriage to Sean Penn had ended acrimoniously. As she turned 30, the age her mother was when she died, Madonna felt unsure of her future. She wanted to make darker, less polished music, songs that touched on her faith, marriage, sexual freedom, and her parents. And she wanted more creative control over every aspect of it.