Our dad loved John Wayne. If there was a John Wayne movie on TV on any Sunday afternoon, we were going to watch it. If there was a Duke movie on the Late Show, he would stay up to watch it.
Both our parents were of a generation that “bought” into the Hollywood dream machine that created, managed and protected images for fans to adulate both on and off screen. There were no cell phones or no tabloid TV shows to burst the bubble of stardom that had been so carefully crafted and guarded.
Not that mom nor dad were that naïve, either. They knew how the world worked and knew instinctively that these stars’ images were mostly artifice. Our dad played along until something happened that openly contravened his religious sensibilities, like Catholic movie stars such as Tyrone Power or Don Ameche who made scandalous headlines by divorcing their wives and marrying other women.
John Wayne was different. His multiple marriages notwithstanding, the Duke was the closest thing to being star-struck our dad ever got. When John Wayne was dying of cancer, so was our dad. It was almost as if they were on the same journey together.
When he was sick, I was the last of my siblings still living at home. The pall that hung over that big old house was oppressive, especially during the worst days of his illness.
One day while driving my car, I heard the news that John Wayne had died on the radio. I did not want to go home that day, imagining the state he would be in. When I did muster the courage to walk in through the back door and into the living room where he sat, you could taste the grief.
But a few days later came more news. John Wayne, a man with Catholic children, had entered the Church while on his deathbed. When I came home that evening, my dad was a changed man. He was still very sick with a disease that was slowly killing him, but the revelation about this icon of American culture with whom he felt a strange connection was better medicine than anything any of his oncologists had ever prescribed. For that joy and comfort John Wayne provided to my dad, I will always be grateful.
To this day, I experience a special kind of joy when I learn of someone deciding to become Catholic, whether they be a celebrity or someone I know personally. I can understand what my dad felt about John Wayne.
I will never know if my dad would have thought of the late Charlie Kirk in the same way he thought about John Wayne. But I am sure he would have taken notice of certain “tells” Charlie Kirk was tipping that he just might have crossed the Tiber one day. Now, we will never know. But I know of two distinctive events that took place prior to his murder.
One was a recent video Kirk made suggesting to his Protestant co-religionists that they did not give the Blessed Mother her due. It was a video that could have been shown in a Catholic school religion class. He even suggested her example was a Christian template applicable across other denominations.
The other was a personal exchange between Charlie Kirk and a Catholic bishop who happens to be my brother: Bishop Joseph Brennan of Fresno. The bishop has given me permission to divulge the content of that conversation.
A little more than a week before his murder, Kirk attended a pro-life prayer breakfast in Visalia, California, which is in the Diocese of Fresno. The bishop was among those in attendance and had a brief, private moment with Kirk.
It was there that Kirk told the bishop about his Catholic wife and children and how he attended Mass with them. He punctuated this conversation with “I love my Catholic pastor.”
As they were parting to attend the more public portion of the prayer breakfast, Kirk mentioned speculation regarding his contemplating entering the Catholic Church, saying: "I'm this close."
My dad would have loved hearing that story from his son. It would have given him joy to contemplate how a man could be loved into the Church by a faithful wife. And how fitting one of Charlie Kirk’s last videos was about the preeminent mediatrix of all time and space. In his own way he was reaching out to her, and now, I am convinced, she is returning the favor.
