Father Figure

It’s not easy to name many gay people who are widely recognized as national heroes, but there’s little question that Father Mychal Judge is one of the few. After he died while assisting victims at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, New York City fire department chaplain Judge became a symbol of those who risked their lives to help others. Beloved for his irreverent humor and ever-available ear, he was such a popular friend and confidant that he wore out three answering machines in nearly a decade of ministering to both Catholic firefighters and gay New Yorkers. But for those who had never contemplated the priest’s sexual orientation, the news that Judge was gay was a posthumous surprise; some firemen were in such denial that they even accused gay activists of wrongfully claiming him as an icon.

But Judge’s legacy -- as a Franciscan priest and a gay man -- survives in The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge, a stirring new biography by New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly. One of the book’s most poignant revelations is that Judge began a journal in 1999, thinking that his struggle to reconcile his public and private lives might make a worthy memoir. In the passages Daly quotes, Judge’s turmoil is heartbreaking. He alternates between his desire to speak out freely as a mature gay priest -- to “release fears, explain the pain, show the joy and give peace to so many” -- and his deep-seated fear that coming out would mean losing his friends, his ministry, and his standing as a priest. “Lord…hold me tight. Don’t let me do anything foolish,” he prayed.

It’s a loss to both gays and Catholics that Judge didn’t live to write his own story. But Daly’s friendship with the priest, his skill as a reporter, and his access to Judge’s journals make his account the closest we’re likely to get to an authorized biography. The beginning and end of the book are particularly gripping, though they border on hagiography. Daly’s empathy for New York City and its characters turns Judge’s Depression-era childhood in Brooklyn into a classic Irish-American story that includes his father’s death when Judge was 6, his often brutal Catholic schooling, and his entrance into a Franciscan seminary at age 15. The final section of the book, which centers on the morning of September 11 and the days following, is equally intense and elegiac.