They had the first of their many famous public falling outs in September 1954, as Julianna and Cedric’s beautiful summer turned to a golden autumn. It was in New York City, on set of The Seven Year Itch. As Monroe filmed wildly erotic (especially for the time) scene in which she stands over a subway grate with the air blowing up her skirt, a photo memorialized in a many a Navy man’s mind for the next fifty years, an image sexy enough to bring a Kennedy to his knees.
Naturally, a crowd of onlookers and press gathered (one wonders how the asphalt didn’t melt beneath them, such was Norma Jean’s hotness); As her skirt blew up again and again, the crowd cheered uproariously, and the Yankee Clipper, who was on set monitoring his wife’s behavior, he lost his infamous temper.
Julianna thought the Seven Year Itch was amazing, a view shared by Father Briar.
DiMaggio and Monroe were divorced in October 1954, just 274 days after they were married. In her filing, Monroe accused her husband of “mental cruelty.” She married the playwright Arthur Miller in 1956, who had extensively written about the aforementioned Sen. Joe McCarthy.
When the 36-year-old Monroe died of a drug overdose on August 5, 1962, DiMaggio arranged the funeral. For the next two decades, until his own death in 1999, he sent roses several times a week to her grave in Los Angeles.
The morning of November 29, 1964, ten years after the events of this story, was a remarkable one in the religious life of American Catholics, and Catholics worldwide.
Brannaska parishioners sitting in their places that morning knew something was different, very very different than they had been before, from the start of Mass.
The week before, and the week before, and every week any of them could remember, the priest and altar boys had entered in reflection and silence.
Now there was singing. Singing! Two verses of a processional hymn. Father Briar, standing behind a brand new altar set up in the middle (the middle!) of the sanctuary, still said some prayers in Latin, but for the most part, the ancient and traditional language of the Church was gone.
The Brannaskans, who’d had warning this change was coming but never really believed it, were encouraged to recite others along with him, again in their own language. Some of them prayed in German, one in Polish, and most in English.
The distribution of Communion was now different. Since the dawn of the faith, the priest had repeated a prayer in Latin as he worked his way along the line of parishioners kneeling at the altar.
Now paused in front of each parishioner, in many places standing rather than kneeling (standing!), held up the Communion host so they could see it, and said, “Corpus Christi” (“the Body of Christ”), to which the communicant responded, “Amen”.
That historic morning, as he blessed Julianna, who looked radiant and full of love and joy, he also thanked God for the simple power of sex and love and asked his forgiveness for indulging in it.
The Church discontinued Latin entirely by 1969. Julianna and Cedric’s love lasted decades longer, well into the 1980’s, although Latin did have a pretty good run: it is tough to argue with two thousand years of success.
Notes and Historical Sources:
Interviews with kind folks who participated in both the Catholic life and the farming life of this era in Minnesota irreplaceably valuable.
Most of all, the author would like to thank her mother. That is no disrespect (and much love!) to fathers, but, as Julian of Norwich once said, “Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.”
The Facebook group, a true collaborative, “Old Minneapolis” as a joy and a source of support and inspiration, if not material directly relevant to the book. But as any author knows, material not being related to the book is often full of truth, portent and unexpected investigative joys.
Various blogs, forum posts, and personal, self-published reminiscences, have all been helpful in providing background and detail to a book that would otherwise gone a little unseasoned and bland without them.
If you think, wherever and whoever you are, that the personal and cherished details of your lives, that you’ve self-published to audiences of your friends and family have gone unnoticed, I assure you with devout faith: they have not.
While we all, if we are moral creatures, be wary of the Catholic Church’s history of despicable criminality when it comes to issues of land and art-theft, not to mention its unconscionable treatment of young boys by pedophile priests. But equally spurious is the idea that all men and women of religious service somehow become perverts without a moral compass is equally untrue. There were good people throughout the clerical bureaucracy, hundreds of thousands of them, and to ignore them is to do a disservice to many just and noble human lives.
“All we are
is all we are,”
Like Kurt Cobain, like Bill Haley and His Coments, like the Hoosier Sodbusters, once sang in what sounds both like a Buddhist Koan and the belief of a Catholic mystic like Julian of Norwidge.
What we are is love. May Cedric Briar and Julianna Warwidge live and love for a good long run, as long as grey wolves, as long as Latin, as long as love itself.
Father Briar and The Angel Page 20
