Media: August 2026 • Kev Meets the Pope
Kevin Matthews with Pope Leo
Kevin Matthews is still fondly remembered in Chicago for his days on the radio here, particularly his time at the Loop (AM 1000/FM 98). Those crazy days of improv radio are chronicled at the Museum of Broadcast Communications if you want to check it out. Kevin was just over there recently and signed the giant poster of himself on the wall. “My hair looked like Farrah Fawcett,” he laments.
But you won’t hear Kevin’s wall of a thousand voices on the radio anymore. These days, he’s on a mission from God. Really. He’s traveling around the world with a broken statue of the Virgin Mary. It’s quite a story.
Kev explains the origin of this new journey. “I was diagnosed with MS, I got fired from radio, and so I pretty much hit rock bottom in November 2011. I was driving, and I just had a desire to get my wife some flowers, because we had been through so much. I looked up, and there was a flower shop. I got out of the car and, as I walked towards the door, I saw a dumpster. On the ground in front of it, there was a statue of the Virgin Mary. She was on her back, broken in half, right at the waist. Her hands were missing, and she was covered in garbage. I knew that this was wrong; this is the Mother of Christ. I went into the flower shop and asked the woman if I could buy the statue, and she said no, it was a family heirloom. I just quickly closed my eyes and opened my mouth, and what came out of my mouth, I have no idea where it came from. I said I’ll give money to nuns that live out around here in your name if I can take her. She said, “Your voice sounds familiar. Are you Kevin Matthews? You got fired last week, didn’t you?” She let me take the statue. Good to my word, I met nuns in the area and became very close to them. Since that day, I’ve written two books, a movie, and had a meeting with the Pope.”
You read that right. Kevin Matthews, the man with a notoriously naughty sense of humor, had a meeting with Pope Leo at the Vatican. “In February,” he explains, “we were invited to come to Rome to meet the Pope. I have a dear friend who’s a priest in Chicago, and he knows the Pope. The Pope was very humbled by the statue. He looked at it and said, ‘It’s broken.’ I replied, ‘Yes, it’s broken, because we’re all broken, but we’re still loved by God.’ The Pope replied, ‘The whole world is broken,’ and he blessed her. She’s now an icon of the Catholic Church.”
The Pope is famously from Chicago. Kevin Matthews was very popular when the Pope lived here. I wondered if the Pope knew who he was. “I didn’t want to ask him if he listened to me,” Kevin admits, “because even though I was wondering that myself, I didn’t want to ruin that moment. Imagine. ‘Let me talk to you about these golf outings you got kicked out of, and toga parties, and gay character voices.’ No, so I left it alone. But Father Joshua Caswell told me about a month ago that the Pope did listen to me. Can you believe it?”
It’s not every day you interview someone who met the Pope. I asked Kevin what kind of a person Pope Leo is. “He’s such a calm man. He listens to you intently, and he smiles beautifully, and he meets with so many people. That’s all he does: meets people all day long. What I love about Pope Leo is you can tell that he’s listening.”
Ever since that meeting, Kevin has essentially become the statue’s roadie. “We’ve gone to hospice, emergency rooms, prisons. The most broken have been with what we call now Our Lady of the Broken. After the Pope’s blessing, we went to France the next month. I’ve been all over the United States, from the west to the east coast, south, north. I love to come and speak, and they love to see this icon. I’ll come anywhere, any country. We walked down Chicago Avenue to the Water Tower, and we had nearly 10,000 people, all the police department, the fire department, and 10,000 regular folks that walked with this statue of Our Lady of the Broken. Everyone can relate to her. Every city, every person is broken. You can go to Brokenmary.com if you want to contact me.”
I asked Kevin how his own health was doing. “I did ask the Pope to bless me too,” he says, “because I need it just like everyone does. But the way I look at it, I have MS, boo hoo. So many people in the world have it worse. Honestly, I feel really, really good. I have a purpose. When the phone rings, it’s time to go. It looks like we’re going to Boston. Or California. Or wherever she is needed. I could do this forever. How cool would it be to be on the road with Mary, and just die? What happened to Kev? He was taking the statue in the car, and he croaked. Maybe I’d get a condolence card from the Pope. He’s my friend now.”
-Rick Kaempfer
