Francis and Clare. Ignatius and Xavier. Felicitas and Perpetua. Some saints we know better because of their friends. The same is true for John and Paul.
Ian Leslie’s new book looks at two “extraordinarily gifted young men,” John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and what happened when they met as teenagers. Their decades-long conversation played out in songs we all know by heart. Leslie takes a long, deep look at their relationship, which began when Paul was only 15 and ended just 23 years later with John’s shocking death.
It was a friendship first, of course—John the slightly older, cooler one, who recruited Paul for his band. They spent so much time together that they developed their own language. George was part of the picture too, and Ringo came a little later, but John and Paul shared a connection that set them apart from the others.
Sometimes, when they sang or they were just hanging out, they would stare into each other’s eyes. What were they looking for? For John, it was surely something he missed out on as a child. His mother was emotionally distant, his father not around. Paul’s mother died when he was just 14, a year before he and John met. They found something in each other. They were more than mates; they were soulmates.
Even after the Beatles broke up and John and Paul lived an ocean apart, they seemed to circle each other “like entangled particles,” Leslie writes. Consider, for a moment, that in 1969 John and Yoko Ono got married just eight days after Paul and Linda Eastman.
“[W]e have trouble thinking about intimate male friendships,” Leslie writes. “We’re used to the idea of men being good friends, or fierce competitors, or sometimes both. We’re used to the idea, these days, of homosexual love. We’re thrown by a relationship that isn’t sexual but is romantic: a friendship that may have had an erotic or physical component to it, but doesn’t involve sex.”
John and Paul were friends, yes—competitors, too. John may have even been attracted to Paul. But their connection was more profound than any single word can describe. And as proof, we have their songs.
Leslie surveys 43 songs from the Lennon-McCartney catalogue. He begins with “Come Go with Me,” a song Paul first heard John play with the Quarrymen in 1957, and ends with “Here Today,” one of the first songs Paul wrote after John’s death. He alternates between John songs and Paul songs, so “Strawberry Fields Forever” (John) segues into “Penny Lane” (Paul), the two sides of the same 45, released in February 1967. Both songs “show us Liverpool from the perspective of altered minds,” Leslie writes in a typically astute bit of analysis. “While ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ takes us down into the netherworld of the unconscious, ‘Penny Lane’ takes us up into the sky, from where we swoop into the world below.”
The chapter on “Hey Jude” dives deeper. Written by Paul, the song is addressed to John’s son, Julian (Jules became Jude), following his father and mother’s divorce. But it is also, Leslie notes, directed at John, making it one of the few pop songs about a close male friendship. The line “You’re waiting for someone to perform with,” for example, is about “how any of us wait for the person who makes us feel more alive,” Leslie writes. For Paul, obviously, that was John, and with “Hey Jude” he found a way to talk to him in a heartfelt way without sounding “corny and contrived.” This is something that both men strove for in their songwriting. They wanted to write from the heart, but in a way that people would really hear, and not dismiss as saccharine.
There are lessons here for evangelization. This is, I know, strange to say. John once declared the Beatles “more popular than Jesus,” and he famously sang about a world with “no religion.” But they spoke from the heart, and they left us with the miracles of their music. (Aug. 15 is the 60th anniversary of their 1965 concert at Shea Stadium—arguably the peak of their stardom.) And it’s a short step from speaking from the heart to speaking to the creator. As Pope Francis writes in “Dilexit Nos,” his encyclical on the Sacred Heart, “Accepting his friendship is a matter of the heart; it is what constitutes us as persons in the fullest sense of that word.”
If John and Paul, by meeting and collaborating on such a deep level, showed us what true friendship can look like, then they also give us a hint of what this most important relationship can be. Their relationship, despite all their well-documented troubles, was fundamentally creative and—I would argue—life-giving. In that too, we can spot the outlines of the creator.
In “Dilexit Nos,” Pope Francis writes that the “interior reality of each person is frequently concealed behind a great deal of ‘foliage,’ which makes it difficult for us not only to understand ourselves, but even more to know others.” Seeing two souls in conversation—whether it’s Ignatius and Xavier or John and Paul—is to see the foliage stripped away. It’s rarer and rarer these days, and worth celebrating.
In 1978, eight years after the Beatles broke up, the Catholic Church welcomed Pope John Paul I, and then John Paul II. The double name—the first in the history of the papacy—was chosen to honor Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. But the yoking of John and Paul in the public imagination may have secretly pleased those Catholics who knew the exact sequence of songs on “Rubber Soul.” Then and now, there are those who would divide the world into John fans and Paul fans. But someone, somewhere knew that their names belong side by side.
This article appears in October 2025.
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