From our Sports Desk comes this tidbit, from the enterprising investigative journalists who run Page Six of the New York Post.

It’s about Joe DiMaggio and the Catholic Church, and it ran on March 8, the 10-year anniversary of Joltin’ Joe’s departure for the Great Dugout In The Sky:

“Few people knew how devout a Catholic he was,” DiMaggio’s longtime friend Dr. Rock Positano tells Page Six. “But he was essentially banned from the church after his divorce from Dorothy Arnold. And he was scolded by Bishop Fulton Sheen for marrying Marilyn Monroe. Sheen told Joe after the marriage dissolved, ‘You had no right marrying her in the first place.’

“DiMaggio told Sheen where to go and scolded him that he had no right to tell him who to marry and never spoke to the bishop again,” Positano says. “But despite that bitterness, Joe never left or turned his back on the Church. He loved to celebrate in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and felt this place was more sacred than the Vatican.”

DiMaggio thought people wouldn’t recognize him when he quietly entered through the cathedral’s discreet 51st Street door in sunglasses. But “one day he was recognized, and after a shout-out by John Cardinal O’Connor, he was given a rousing applause in the middle of Mass by all the parishioners,” Positano recalls. “I quipped to him, ‘Nice disguise, Joe, you really fooled them.’ “

Another time at Mass, as parishioners turned to each other to offer a sign of peace, he extended his hand to a man who sat at his left. “The man said, ‘Mr. DiMaggio, may the peace of Christ be with you,’ and then immediately added, ‘Would you mind signing this picture for me?’ “

Positano relates: “Joe was flustered and flabbergasted, but [so as] not to make a scene he took out his Sharpie pen and told the fellow, ‘I don’t think Pope John Paul would be too happy if he knew I was signing my name across his forehead.’ Then Joe turned to me and said, ‘Doc, this is the last time I’m wearing sunglasses in church.’ “

As another tried-and-true New Yorker likes to say: Only in New York, kids.