They don’t make a dime, wreck their car, and end up in jail.
Pope Leo XIV recently met Lou Marini, who is best known popularly as the saxophonist from the Blues Brothers band on several albums and in the Blues Brothers film. “Blue Lou” was part of the Saturday Night Live band when he was recruited to be an original part of the crack rhythm-and-blues band backing John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Sadly, in addition to Belushi’s early death in 1982, we’ve lost three key members of that band in recent years — guitar legend Steve Cropper in 2025, guitarist Matt “Guitar” Murphy in 2018, and bass player Donald “Duck” Dunn in 2012.
The Chicago-born pope, who can be seen dressed in a Blues Brothers-homage hat and sunglasses in an early-80s photo, acknowledged his love for the film back in the day (it came out when he was a seminarian; he was ordained in 1982). Now, if it’s been a while since you saw the original, uncut film, it is certainly not a family-friendly movie. Having seen it repeatedly in broadcast reruns, I’d forgotten until airing it for my then-teenage kids quite how much foul language is in the movie. Nor is it entirely reverent in its treatment of Sister Mary Stigmata, the nun character dubbed “the penguin.”
Nonetheless, in important ways, The Blues Brothers as a movie is a very Christian and in some instances specifically Catholic movie. The entire plot is that the miscreant lead characters, Jake and Elwood Blues, were raised by Catholic nuns (and by a blues-loving janitor played by Cab Calloway) in an orphanage, and when Jake gets out of jail, they discover that the city of Chicago is about to foreclose on the orphanage for unpaid property taxes, so they set about raising the money themselves by putting on a benefit concert. For an ecumenical touch, Jake gets a divine revelation to reunite with the band while attending a black Baptist church (with a singing minister played by James Brown). From that point forward, they are on what Elwood describes unironically as “a mission from God.”
Plot aside, the movie is a heartfelt love letter to black music, giving Calloway a stage he hadn’t enjoyed in years and helping propel figures such as Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles into 1980s career revivals after a period of disco-era doldrums. Jake and Elwood get nothing of value out of the concert besides an excuse to play good music, annoy the authorities and the local Nazis, and run up some large bar tabs along the way. They don’t make a dime, wreck their car, and end up in jail. They’re not saintly figures in the least (and there’s a comical volume of property damage in the process), yet their actions are motivated only by charity and gratitude. That’s not such a bad message in today’s world.