Father Mychal F. Judge at St. Francis of Assisi Church & Friary

History

Father Mychal F. Judge (1933-2001) was born Robert Emmett Judge to Irish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, where he grew up in poverty during the Great Depression. After his father’s death, when Judge was six years old, he helped support his family by working a number of odd jobs. As a shoe shiner outside (the original) Penn Station, he was in close proximity to St. Francis of Assisi Church, a historic Catholic Church complex facing West 31st and 32nd Streets, where he would visit Franciscan Friars. In 1954, Judge was received into the Franciscan Order and was given the name Michael Fallon (he later changed “Michael” to “Mychal” to differentiate himself from other Father Michaels). In 1961, he was ordained to the priesthood.

Over the next 25 years, Fr. Mychal served various communities in the northeast. In 1986, he was appointed an associate pastor of St. Francis of Assisi Church and moved into a room facing 31st Street in the neighboring friary. He became a beloved Catholic chaplain to the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) in 1992, serving firefighters and their families in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. He was particularly close with the firefighters of Engine 1-Ladder 24, located across the street from the church. In 1996, he ministered to the families of victims from the TWA Flight 800 crash. He was also an adamant supporter of addicts (himself a recovering alcoholic) and the homeless, serving in the church’s Breadline.

Fr. Mychal was an important religious figure during the AIDS crisis, ministering to gay men dying from the disease, leading their funeral Masses, and consoling their partners and families. As a gay man, he also knew the struggles that LGBT Catholics faced and was a source of comfort to those who confided in him.

Fr. Mychal only told his close friends, friars he felt he could trust, and the fire commissioner that he was gay. Activist Brendan Fay noted that his friend “recognized the tension between the worlds he lived in. He’d be honored by these members of the far right, and yet at the same time he felt he had to constrain himself. There was a certain sadness about that.” He nevertheless actively supported the LGBT community. As a member of Dignity/New York, a gay Catholic organization, he welcomed the group to set up an AIDS ministry at St. Francis. He later ran an AIDS program at the church. In 2000, he marched in the first St. Pat’s for All Parade, organized by Fay, in Queens.

On September 11, 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, Fr. Mychal rushed from the friary to Lower Manhattan to offer assistance, last rites, and prayers. While in the lobby of the North Tower, he was killed by debris from the collapsing South Tower. First responders eventually found him in the rubble and carried his body — captured in a famous photo — to the corner of Church and Vesey Streets; he was then placed on the altar of the nearby St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church. Fr. Mychal was designated as “Victim 0001,” the first certified casualty on 9/11. His televised funeral was held at St. Francis of Assisi on September 15th, and was attended by nearly 3,000 people watching from inside and outside the church.

Fr. Mychal received numerous posthumous honors, including the 2002 co-naming of “Father Mychal F. Judge Street” on the church’s West 31st Street block and a plaque on Chicago’s Legacy Walk, which celebrates notable LGBT people, on October 11, 2014. He is the focus of the 2006 documentary Saint of 9/11, narrated by Ian McKellen and co-produced by Fay. Since 2003, the Father Mychal Judge 9/11 Walk of Remembrance has been held annually on the Sunday before September 11th in memory of first responders, with a route from St. Francis of Assisi to St. Peter’s.

Entry by Amanda Davis, project manager (September 2020).

NOTE: Names above in bold indicate LGBT people.