The first recorded victim of 9/11 was a gay Catholic priest

Twenty-five years after Father Mychal Judge died inside the World Trade Center, the life behind one of the day’s defining images still challenges the Catholic Church’s ideas about who may be holy.

In the photograph, almost everything is gray.

Five men, their faces and clothing coated in ash, carry the body of the Rev. Mychal Judge through the ruins of the World Trade Center. His head falls to one side. His black clerical clothes and white Roman collar remain visible against the surrounding carnage.

Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton’s image would travel around the world and become known as the “modern Pietà,” after Michelangelo’s sculpture of Mary cradling the body of Jesus. Before most people knew Judge’s name, they knew his death.

Related: Supporters Push for Gay Priest Who Died on 9/11 to Be Made a Saint

Judge, the beloved Franciscan chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, was designated Victim No. 1 of the September 11, 2001, attacks. He was not the first of the nearly 3,000 people killed that morning. His was the first body formally recorded by New York City’s medical examiner.

Twenty-five years later, that bureaucratic number and sacred-looking photograph still threaten to flatten him into a symbol. Judge was also a recovering alcoholic, a tireless minister to people with HIV and AIDS, a friend to homeless New Yorkers, and a gay man who found room inside himself for an identity his church still struggled to hold.

“I was talking to some younger colleagues who were working with me in a gay Catholic organization who had not heard of Father Judge because they were like nine years old when 9/11 happened,” Francis DeBernardo, executive director of the LGBTQ+ Catholic organization New Ways Ministry, tells The Advocate.

“It felt like he needed to be remembered as an important part of that tragic day.”

DeBernardo is the author of the 2021 biography Mychal Judge: Take Me Where You Want Me to Go. After studying Judge’s life, he sees no separation between the priest who entered the North Tower and the man who had spent decades walking toward people whom institutions preferred not to see.

“He was a person who loved people, and he was most alive when he was around people,” DeBernardo says.

Related: Remembering Our LGBT Heroes as One World Trade Center Opens

“I’m not finished”

Firefighters stand together as they listen to the funeral for New York Fire Department Chaplain Rev. Mychal Judge, in front of the St. Francis of Assisi Church, September 15, 2001, in New York City. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Judge was 68 and had served as an FDNY chaplain since 1992, when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower.

According to DeBernardo, another friar saw the plane fly low over Manhattan and hit the building, then rushed back to the friary on West 31st Street. Judge changed into his clerical clothing and joined firefighters racing downtown.

Fire chaplains ordinarily remained outside the immediate danger zone, available to comfort victims, first responders and their families. Judge entered the North Tower.

As people trapped above the flames fell from the building, witnesses saw his lips moving in prayer. He remained near the fire department’s makeshift command post in the lobby before climbing to a mezzanine where injured people were arriving.

City and fire officials moved their command operation away from the towers as the danger grew. When Judge was encouraged to go with them, he refused.

“I’m not finished,” he said, according to DeBernardo’s biography.

At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed, forcing a violent cloud of smoke and debris into the North Tower. Rescuers found Judge after the darkness began to clear. He had no pulse.

His precise cause of death remains uncertain. No autopsy was performed, DeBernardo writes. His death certificate listed blunt-force trauma, but witnesses saw no obvious fatal wound. Smoke inhalation, falling debris, or a heart attack brought on by the collapse may have killed him, DeBernardo speculates.

The firefighters would not leave their chaplain behind. They placed his body on a broken plastic chair and carried him through the debris. Stapleton saw the procession and raised his camera.

Judge’s body was eventually taken to Bellevue Hospital. His death certificate was assigned the number DM0001-01, with “DM” standing for “Disaster Manhattan.”

Four days later, thousands gathered for his funeral at St. Francis of Assisi Church. Former President Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea, attended. The crowd filled the church and spilled into the street, where screens carried the service to mourners outside.

Among them, DeBernardo writes, was a homeless man living with AIDS who had bought a tuxedo at a thrift store because he wanted to dress properly for the priest who had treated him as a friend.

Related: The Stories of 9/11's LGBTQ+ Heroes

A gay priest in a church that could not say so

Judge never issued a public coming out statement. For a Catholic priest of his generation, disclosure was more intimate, coded, and dangerous.

After a sabbatical in Canterbury, England, in the early 1980s, he became more open with trusted friends, gay priests, and LGBTQ+ Catholics, DeBernardo says. He attended Dignity liturgies and joined a support group for gay clergy. He sometimes signaled recognition to other gay men through a joke, a glance, or a remark about another man’s beauty.

His journal was more direct. On its inside cover, Judge described himself as “Irish, Catholic, Democrat, priest, gay and more.”

The wider world learned about this part of him only after his death. At an October 2001 memorial service at New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, Judge’s name was read with those of other LGBTQ+ people killed in the attacks.

The revelation produced an immediate backlash from some conservative Catholics. To them, Judge’s priesthood and apparent holiness became evidence that he could not have been gay.

“He can’t be gay. He was a good priest, as if a gay man can’t be a good priest,” DeBernardo says, describing their reaction.

But people close to Judge said his sexuality did not diminish his vocation. It deepened his understanding of what it meant to live at the edge of acceptance.

Judge had experienced alcoholism before becoming sober through Alcoholics Anonymous in 1978. He knew shame, concealment, and the restorative power of being welcomed without qualification. Those experiences became bridges to other people carrying stigmas of their own.

He entered another kind of burning building

Visitors attend the wake of New York Fire Department Chaplain Father Mychal Judge at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in New York 13 September 2001.STAN HONDA/AFP via Getty Images

During the worst years of the AIDS crisis, Judge helped establish one of New York City’s first Catholic HIV/AIDS ministries, according to the Associated Press.

When the Catholic LGBTQ+ organization Dignity was forced out of a Manhattan parish, threatening its ministry to people with HIV and AIDS, Judge welcomed the work into St. Francis of Assisi Church. He assembled a small team to visit hospital rooms, counsel families, lead retreats, and bury people whom other institutions had rejected.

This was a time when fear of AIDS contaminated nearly every human interaction. Some healthcare workers avoided patients’ rooms. Funeral homes refused bodies. Churches denied burial rites. Families disappeared.

Judge went in.

Long before he entered the North Tower, he had practiced staying with people when fear instructed everyone else to leave.

Judge understood that his life might one day speak more freely than he could. In his journal, he imagined that people who respected him might reconsider their prejudices if they knew that he, too, was gay.

“Sexually, I am alive as I can be,” he wrote.

For DeBernardo, the line is not merely a declaration of orientation. It is a spiritual claim to wholeness.

“I think for gay people and for others, that is a very Christian, Catholic, and humanistic statement,” he says: “to work to be as alive as you can be.”

A saint still waiting for a cause

Firefighter Tony James cries while attending the funeral service for New York Fire Department Chaplain Rev. Mychal Judge, in front of the St. Francis of Assisi Church September 15, 2001 in New York City. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Judge’s name now appears on panel S-18 at the National September 11 Memorial. A Manhattan street bears his name. His fire helmet was presented to Pope John Paul II. His grave in Totowa, New Jersey, has become a pilgrimage site, and an annual walk retraces his final route from St. Francis of Assisi Church to the World Trade Center.

Many believers already call him a saint. The Roman Catholic Church has not.

In 2017, Pope Francis established a new route to beatification and canonization called the “offer of life.” It applies to Christians who freely accept a certain and premature death out of love for others. The standard seemed written for a priest who was offered safety and answered that his work was not finished.

The Rev. Luis Escalante, a Rome-based priest who has worked on sainthood cases, began collecting testimony about Judge. New Ways Ministry provided about 25 names, DeBernardo says.

But no formal cause has been opened. Canonization requires extensive research, administration, fundraising and, eventually, evidence of a miracle. A diocese, a religious order, or a well-financed organization generally sustains such efforts, DeBernardo explains. Neither Judge’s Franciscan order nor the Archdiocese of New York agreed to sponsor the work, DeBernardo says.

New Ways Ministry tried to help organize an independent effort, but it never developed the resources necessary to carry the cause forward.

“It has sort of gone by the wayside waiting for someone to sponsor it,” DeBernardo says.