Out Spotlight

Today’s Out Spotlight was perhaps, New York City's most recognized and beloved Catholic priest, with an unwavering dedication to putting himself at the center of human anguish - and with an uncanny knack for ending up in the limelight. The chaplain to the New York City Fire Department, he died September 11, 2001 in the North Tower of the World Trade Center and became the first officially recorded fatality following the attack. Today’s Out Spotlight is Father Mychal F. Judge, OFM.

Father Mychal F. Judge was born Robert Emmett Judge in Brooklyn, NY on May 11, 1933, was the son of two Irish immigrants from County Leitrim, Ireland. He lost his father after a long illness and to help his mother and two sisters make ends meet, he shined shoes in Manhattan, ran errands and did odd jobs, before being called to his Franciscan vocation at age 16.

He entered St. Joseph’s Seraphic Seminary, Callicoon, NY, and graduated in 1954 after completing the first two years of college.

He was received into the Franciscan Order on August 12, 1954 and the following year, on August 13, professed his first vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as stated in the Rule of Life of St. Francis of Assisi. He professed final vows on August 20, 1958, taking the name Michael.

He was ordained to the priesthood on February 25, 1961 at the Franciscan Monastery – Mt. St. Sepulchre, Washington, DC. He spent a year in pastoral training at St. Anthony Shrine, Boston, Mass., before his first assignment 1962-66 as an assistant at St. Joseph’s Church, East Rutherford, NJ and then served as an assistant at Sacred Heart Church, Rochelle Park, NJ from 1967-69. In 1969 he came to St. Francis of Assisi Church, New York City, as local moderator for the Secular Franciscan fraternities.

In 1970, he returned to St. Joseph’s Church, as coordinator of the parochial team ministry of Franciscan friars. After six years, he was appointed as assistant to the president at Siena College in Loudonville, NY, where he served until 1979. He then became pastor of St. Joseph’s Church in West Milford, NJ. In 1985 he undertook a one-year theological sabbatical at the Franciscan house of studies in Canterbury, England.

Upon returning in the summer of 1986, he was appointed an associate pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Church, New York City. At the friary there, finding many “Michaels” on the staff, he decided to change the spelling of his name to Mychal. Only a few days after arriving at St. Francis, he responded to a call to celebrate Mass in the hospital room of New York police officer Steven McDonald, who had been critically wounded during an investigation of a youth in Central Park. It was his first official connection to the NYPD and NYFD.

In 1992, upon the death of Fr. Julian Deeken, a Franciscan friar who had served as one of the Catholic chaplains for the New York Fire Department, Father Mychal accepted an invitation to serve temporarily in his place. Fr. Mychal was named chaplain officially in 1994 to serve the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. He offered encouragement and prayers at fires, rescues, and hospitals, and counseled firemen and their families, often working 16 hour days. "His whole ministry was about love. Mychal loved the fire department and they loved him."

When TWA Flight 800 exploded shortly after takeoff from New York in July 1996 and fell into the Atlantic off Long Island, Fr Mychal helped counsel the families and friends of the victims every day for three weeks and worked to arrange a permanent memorial at the site. He had since returned every summer to offer a memorial service and comfort the families.

In New York, Fr. Mychal was also well known for ministering to the homeless, the hungry, recovering alcoholics, people with AIDS, the sick, injured, and grieving, immigrants, gays and lesbians and those alienated by the Church. He once gave the winter coat off his back to a homeless woman in the street, later saying, "She needed it more than me." When he anointed a man who was dying of AIDS, the man asked him, "Do you think God hates me?" Father Judge just picked him up, kissed him, and silently rocked him in his arms.

Even before his death, many considered Fr Mychal to be a living saint for his extraordinary works of charity and his deep spirituality. While praying, he would sometimes "become so lost in God, as if lost in a trance, that he'd be shocked to find several hours had passed."

"He achieved an extraordinary degree of union with the divine," said Judge's former spiritual director, Father John McNeill. "We knew we were dealing with someone directly in line with God."

Upon hearing the news that the World Trade Center had been hit, Fr Mychal rushed to the site. He was met by the Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, who asked him to pray for the city and its victims. He administered the Last Rites to some lying on the streets, then entered the lobby of the World Trade Center North Tower, where an emergency command post was organized. There he continued offering aid and prayers for the rescuers, the injured and dead.

When the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 am, debris went flying through the North Tower lobby, killing many inside, including Judge. He had taken off his helmet to give Last Rites those around him in the lobby, at the moment he was struck in the head and killed, Judge was repeatedly praying aloud, "Jesus, please end this right now! God, please end this!”, according to Judge's biographer and New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly.

Shortly after his death, a NYPD lieutenant, who had also been buried in the collapse, found his body and assisted by two firemen and two civilian bystanders carried it out of the North Tower lobby to nearby St Peter's Church. This event was captured in the documentary film 9/11, shot by Jules and Gedeon Naudet. Shannon Stapleton, photographer from Reuters, photographed Judge's body being carried out of the rubble by five men. It became one of the most famous images related to 9/11.

With no one to give him Last Rites, and in the middle of all the chaos, dust and horror, the two cops knelt down in the street next to him. As people ran screaming all around them, they laid hands on his body, said the Lord's Prayer and paused for a moment of silence. They then stood, hugged each other, and ran back into the burning buildings to keep pulling people to freedom.

Father Mychal Judge was designated as "Victim 0001," recognized as the first official victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Other victims perished before him including air crew, passengers, and occupants of the towers, but Judge was the first certified fatality because his was the first body to be recovered and taken to the coroner.

Judge's body was formally identified by NYPD Detective Steven McDonald, a long-time friend. The NY Medical Examiner found that Judge died of "blunt force trauma to the head".

On September 15, over 3000 people packed St Francis of Assisi Church for his funeral, while crowds stood in the street outside watching on television screens. Inside, former president Bill Clinton remembered how he "lit up the White House" at a prayer breakfast; New York's new Archbishop, Cardinal Egan, proclaimed him "a saint"; and his fellow Franciscan, Father Michael Duffy said: "Mychal Judge has always been my friend. And now he is my hero."

Thousands felt the same. One of the firefighters, who had come to the church still covered in grime from Ground Zero, simply said: "I just think God wanted somebody to lead the guys to heaven."

In the months following Fr Mychal's death, accolades continued to pile up around him. He received honorary doctorates, religious prizes and an international award for "Moral Courage". He had streets, ferries and scholarships named after him. He was named the honorary Grand Marshal of St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Chicago in 2002. The New York City firefighters solemnly presented his helmet to the Pope in St Peter's Basilica, the nation of France gave him its Legion of Honor, and in Ireland named him its Man of the Year.

Judge, however, was not just the real thing - he was a real man. In the days following 9-11 attention turned to the actual life, personality and spirituality of the man who died so heroically in lower Manhattan on that dark day.

In many ways, he seemed to be the model of the good priest. Without question, he was passionately committed to pastoral ministry and his generosity and compassion made people flock to him, especially in times of need.

However, some suggest there was something obsessive about Judge's commitment to ministry. Underneath his genuine warmth, humor and dedication he was a driven man who struggled with issues of self-worth and addiction. He was an alcoholic who had been sober since 1978, and he relied upon regular meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous to maintain focus and inner peace. He took the spirituality of AA's 12 steps deeply into his soul, and he learned self-acceptance and perseverance in the company of people who were struggling just like him. He had no illusions about himself, and it was his direct, transparent humanness that drew all kinds of people to him.

People also turned to him when the church had failed them. He was always ready to bend the rules, offer a hug and a blessing and show people what the love of God was really like. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when nurses were frightened to touch people with AIDS and priests were refusing to bury them, Judge would often turn up at a hospital room unannounced. He would quietly turn back the covers on the bed of an AIDS patient and gently massage his feet. One man remembers that when his partner was dying,he came to give him Holy Communion.

His commitment to being close to people in their brokenness, and his astonishing tenderness, were forged in a heart weathered by his own struggle to believe he was embraced and blessed by God. What many did know was that Fr. Mychal was gay. He was a celibate gay man

One reporter received a letter from a friend from Ireland in it, it read: "What has not yet come out is that Mychal was gay. He was also not fully 'out'. Sometimes when we visited gay clubs in the Village he would joke that he had his clerical collar in his pocket, so that if a fire truck passed him on the street he could slip it on and say he was on a pastoral visit."

But Fr. Mychal Judge was no cowering, closeted cleric. His fellow Franciscans, senior firefighters, people in AA and countless Catholics in New York knew he was gay, and knew that he was committed to using his priesthood, his resources and his energies to support and empower gay people in spiritual, practical and even financial ways. He did this even as he maintained his official cover within the institutional church, taking extraordinary risks and making the system serve justice.

Journal entries published in The Book of Mychal, a 2008 biography, showed how he struggled with the secretiveness his sexual orientation sometimes required. "I thought of my gay self and how the people I meet never get to know me fully," he wrote.

He bent church rules by joining the gay Catholic group Dignity and allowing it to meet in his Franciscan-run parish. He counseled gay couples and the parents of gay children, according to Fay, and began ministering to AIDS victims during the 1980s, when the disease was considered a gay scourge.

After years of struggle and uncertainty, Judge had learned to accept his sexuality as a gift of God, and when gay newspapers in Manhattan broke the story of the "gay saint" and printed his picture on their front pages instead of some hot hunk, friends said that he would have laughed and been delighted.

The Church, however, was not so pleased. The Cardinal literally fled from gay journalists who asked him about the homosexual he had so recently proclaimed a saint. Some of his friends received angry phone calls from conservative clerics after they spoke to the gay press. Judge's image started disappearing from church websites and newspapers, and talk of canonisation died. It seemed Catholic leaders had no idea how to handle this holy gay man.

But some did. When All Saints Church in Syracuse, NY, sought a way to signal its hospitality to gays and lesbians in their parish, they turned to a well-known image from the 9/11 attacks: the five men carrying a Fr. Mychal from the wreckage of the World Trade Center to create at statue for their church. All Saints hopes the statue will demonstrate that the parish, following Judge's lead, is committed to closing the chasms between rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, said the Rev. Fred Daley, the church's pastor. Moreover, Daley said, the monument will memorialize a man who, like many gays and lesbians, struggled to fit into a church that considers homosexual desires "an intrinsic moral evil" and seeks to prohibit gay men from becoming priests.

"Here's a gay person who was committed to celibacy, flourishing in the priesthood. It breaks so many stereotypes that people have," said Daley, who came out as gay himself in 2004."For young gay people in particular, how good it is that Mychal Judge can be a role model for them."

Fr Mychal has become a hero bordering on sainthood to scores of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Catholics.

While some of the Judge's closest friends didn't know he was gay, David Fullam, whose firehouse sat across the street from the Franciscan friary. The former firefighter wears a bracelet emblazoned with Judge's name and donated $240 recently to All Saints' monument fund.

"We knew that he ministered to the AIDS population and the gay population," Fullam said. "He was very inclusive." While some firefighters were taken aback when they learned that Judge was gay after his death, they would have accepted him regardless, he said.

"We didn't care if he was gay or straight," Fullam said. "We loved him."

In June 2002, President George W. Bush signed the Mychal Judge Act, granting federal money to certain survivors of victims of 9/11, including same-sex partners.

As the days went by, we learned that some of the missing rescue personnel were gay, and that many of their lovers, some of whom are cops and fire fighters, were grieving in silence for fear of outing them. There were also gay cops that lost family members that were rescue personnel. We all learned too quickly and in too cruel a way that the closet is a terrible place to grieve... -- Edgar Rodriguez, executive director, Gay Officers Action League New York, Rodriquez lost his partner a firefighter on 9-11.

Tom Ryan, one of just three out-of-the-closet firefighters in New York at the time, [said] he "learned that about 25 closeted gay firefighters died on Sept. 11," and he knows "others who survived but are still afraid to come out."

We remember some of those in the LGBT community that are known to have lost their lives 10 years ago today.

Mark Bingham, United Airlines Flight 93

Carol Flyzik's, American Airlines Flight 11

David Charlebois, co-pilot of American Airlines Flight 77

Graham Berkeley, United Airlines Flight 175

Ronald Gamboa and Dan Brandhorst, United Airlines Flight 175
The couple was flying home to LA with their 3-year-old adopted son, David. They were founding members of the Pop Luck Club in Los Angeles.

Joe Ferguson, American Airlines Flight 77
Director of geography education outreach for the National Geographic Society

Jeffrey Collman, flight attendant American Airlines Flight 11

Waleska Martinez, United Airlines Flight 93

Pamela J. Boyce, WTC

John Keohane, NYC

Sheila Hein, Pentagon

Eddie Ognibene, WTC North Tower

Eugene Clark, WTC South Tower

Wesley Mercer, VP of Corporate Security Morgan Stanley, WTC North Tower

Luke Dudek, Windows on the World

Michael Lepore, WTC North Tower

Tony Karnes, WTC North Tower

Seamus O'Neal, WTC

Catherine Smith, WTC

Patricia McAneney, WTC

Renee Barrett, WTC North Tower

Always Remembered, Never Forgotten.