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Twenty-five years ago this morning, on September 10, 2001, Father Mychal Judge stood inside the quarters of Engine 73 and Ladder 42 in the Bronx and celebrated Mass for the rededication of the firehouse.
In the homily, the FDNY chaplain told the men what their vocation amounted to: “You do what God has called you to do. You show up. You put one foot in front of another. You get on the rig and you go out and you do the job — which is a mystery.”
Less than twenty-four hours later, he showed up.
Father Mychal Judge was the first recorded death at Ground Zero on September 11, 2001. He may yet become something else: the first known gay saint in the history of the Catholic Church. His life and death reveal what authentic American patriotism and humble Christian service look like, and he died as he lived, ministering to the suffering as a firefighter, patriot, priest, and saint.
When the first plane struck the North Tower, Mychal rushed downtown with the firefighters. At the scene, he ran past New York’s Mayor, who put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Mychal, please pray for us.”
The priest turned, smiled, and answered, “I always do.” Then he kept running with the firefighters into the building.
Invited to join city officials in a safer location, he declined. The line his friends have repeated for twenty-five years is “My work here isn’t finished.”
By the accounts of those who were there, other priests came to the scene that day, but he was the only one who went into the towers. In the lobby, amid smoke and terror, he offered absolution and gave the Last Rites.
At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower fell, and its debris tore through the North Tower lobby. A piece of falling wreckage struck his head. He collapsed and became the first recorded casualty of the attacks, Victim 0001, the number printed at the top of his death certificate.
Five men carried him out: firefighters Christian Waugh and Zachary Vause, NYPD Lt. William Cosgrove, FDNY EMT Kevin Allen, and a civilian named John Maguire. Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton was there.
The men brought his body up the center aisle of St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street, laid it before the altar, covered it with a sheet, and set his stole and his fire badge on top of it. They knelt for a moment before going back to work.
That photograph has embodied for me the definition of authentic American patriotism and humble service. It is a modern-day Pietà, and it reminds me of Jesus’s friends carrying him to the tomb after his death.
Why did he go in?
The question matters this week, because empathy itself has become a target among some. In May, Pope Leo XIV said compassion and empathy are “a call from God to reflect his goodness in our daily lives.”
Mychal Judge is what the pope meant. He felt the pain of his firefighters as his own, and that feeling carried him past the point where sense would have stopped him, into the mystery and the darkness of that morning.
His fellow Franciscan Father Michael Duffy described what he was doing when he died: “He was praying, because in the ritual for anointing, we’re always saying, Jesus come, Jesus forgive, Jesus save. He was talking to God, and he was helping someone.”
Leo said at the Angelus in January that God “does not look at the world from afar, without touching our lives, our wounds and our hopes.” As far as I can tell, nobody in New York has lived that sentence out more completely than the Franciscan in the fire helmet.
He had been rehearsing for that lobby his whole life. When Cardinal John O’Connor barred the gay Catholic group Dignity from archdiocesan churches in 1986, Judge welcomed its AIDS ministry into St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street, a Franciscan church outside the cardinal’s control, and he later ran the parish’s own AIDS program.
Patients with the disease were treated as lepers in those years, and he sat at their bedsides when many others would not. One dying man asked him, “Do you think God hates me?” Judge picked him up and kissed him, then rocked him in his arms without saying a word.
He worked the bread line outside the church, and once gave a homeless man the winter coat off his back (“he needed it more than me,” he said afterward). He had been in Alcoholics Anonymous since 1978, and he knew the inside of other people’s darkness because he had walked through his own.
At his funeral on September 15, 2001, three thousand people filled St. Francis of Assisi, among them Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the everyday people in the pews described how Father Mychal had helped them in their hour of need, how he had found them medical care, clothing, housing, and a future. Everyone thought Mychal was their best friend, because he was.
Here is how Duffy put it in the homily:
“In the next few weeks, we’re going to have names added, name after name of people, who are being brought out of that rubble. And Mychal Judge is going to be on the other side of death to greet them instead of sending them there.
“And so, this morning we come to bury Mike Judge’s body but not his spirit. We come to bury his mind but not his dreams. We come to bury his voice but not his message. We come to bury his hands but not his good works. We come to bury his heart but not his love. Never his love.”
Soledad O’Brien, Mike Barnicle, and Tim Russert told his story on MSNBC and NBC in poignant segments the next day.
No cause for his canonization has been opened. His own Franciscan province declined in 2021; its leader, Father Kevin Mullen, said the friars would “leave it to our brothers in the generations to come to inquire about sainthood.”
A Vatican postulator, Father Luis Escalante, has kept collecting testimonies without them.
Pope Francis in 2017 created a path to beatification for those who freely offer their lives for others, under the title Maiorem hac dilectionem, and the category fits a chaplain who died mid-anointing.
Nor has Washington moved. Chuck Schumer asked the White House to award him the Medal of Freedom in 2011, and the request sits where he left it fifteen years later.
On Sunday, for the twenty-fifth year, firefighters and police officers walked three miles down Seventh Avenue from St. Francis of Assisi to St. Peter’s, alongside his friends and family, retracing the ground between the friary where he lived and the church where his body was laid. Patti Ann McDonald, whose late husband, Detective Steven McDonald, founded the walk, said, “Father Mike was just there for everybody.”
I was 12 years old and in Tennessee that Tuesday. Every time I visit Ground Zero now, I purposely walk to his name on the bronze parapet of the South Pool, Panel S-18, and take a moment to pray. To me he is exactly what every Catholic in this country, and indeed the entire world, should be: a selfless giver of Christ’s redeeming love.
St. Mychal Judge, pray for us.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Father Mychal Judge and with everyone who still walks toward the suffering when walking away is the easier road — from the chaplains and firefighters of this city to the ordinary Catholics who refuse to let empathy be sneered at from a pulpit.
While some seek wealth and fame, Mychal Judge had a bread line on West 31st Street and a firehouse across from it; we know which of the two the Gospel describes.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than fear and contempt. They are looking for the love Father Duffy said we could never bury, and twenty-five years on, they are still finding it in a Franciscan who died ministering to God’s heroes in a lobby.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Should be our first Saint from 911 🙏
He’s obviously a saint, but should not be a Saint.
Unless we are dropping the miracle bar, or are somehow claiming he died as a martyr for his faith.