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Even at Death's Door, Ministering to Others

Dennis Duggan

September 16, 2001

When Cardinal Edward Egan said that yesterday's splendid, nearly three-hour Mass of Christian Burial for the Rev. Mychal Judge was a "last farewell" for the one and only fire chaplain, I thought about a photograph Judge cherished.

Lying against a chair in his third-floor, sparsely furnished bedroom, it shows Judge leading a procession of pallbearers down church steps and carrying a casket containing the body of still another hero firefighter.

It is titled "The Last Roll Call," and yesterday it was Judge's turn to meet his maker. The Rev. Michael Duffy from Philadelphia, Judge's handpicked homilist, said it was just like Judge to be among the first at that terrible downtown site where he gave the dying last rites.

"I think he planned it so he could be the first to lead the other firefighters into heaven and see him now standing before the pearly gates with that big, Irish smile of his welcoming the rest of the firefighters," Duffy said.

Judge would have liked that, but I know he wouldn't have liked the picture of him in The New York Times, and The Boston Globe, being carried by five firefighters who were taking him over to St. Peter's church a few blocks away. A caption under the picture referred to him as an "unidentified victim."

Judge was one of those men who had a strong identity. He was a big, handsome son of Irish immigrants who grew up on Dean Street in Brooklyn where he shined shoes trying to help his widowed mother make ends meet. And people notice guys with movie-star looks, and an easy manner devoid of airs.

He had magnetism that rivaled that of the late Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, a onetime television celebrity with eyes that burned through you and a voice that seemed heaven-sent.

Judge, as his old friend the lawyer Peter J. Johnson said from the altar yesterday, was the kind of man "who treated presidents and paupers with equal respect."

Sure enough, there was former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton who delivered a fine speech herself, and their daughter Chelsea. I didn't see any paupers, but they are a strong presence at the church where 47 Franciscan friars run one of the city's oldest foodlines.

It's probably no coincidence that the church is across the street from Ladder 24, an ill-starred firehouse that lost several of its men in the devil's pit that was once the site of the Twin Towers.

Johnson, a prominent lawyer, told me that his friend of many years had struggled with physical pain, cancer, for one, and peritonitis for another, that nearly killed him. But Judge always came up with a wink and a nod and as Johnson said, "He was the kind of man who more than matched his press clippings."

Johnson said that when the Golden Venture washed up on the shores of the Rockaways in 1993, he got a call from Judge.

"Let's go," said Judge.

When they arrived at the site and Judge saw the frightened Chinese immigrants on the beach he raced over to them and began chatting though he speaks no Chinese. "They were laughing," says Johnson, and he was ordering hot coffee for them.

I ran into an old friend, Trudy Mason, a New York State Democratic committeewoman from Manhattan, on the way out of the church.

"Eight years ago Father Judge came with Mayor David Dinkins and several rabbis to Israel where the terrorists had blown up several buses.

"The terrorists didn't get him there, but they got him here," she said with a rueful shake of her head.

Ah, well. I know Judge would have enjoyed his own wake. It was full of humor and thankfully light on the platitudes about going to a better place.

But if the firefighters ever needed their much loved chaplain, they need him now. They are a devastated company, with their top command decimated, and their ranks shattered by unimaginable losses. To make matters worse, many of their families will be deprived of even the slight comfort of seeing their bodies in a coffin.

But their minstrel boy is gone, and yesterday all the mourners who filled up all the pews and the aisles had were their own loving memories and his friends' tributes.

"He has always been my friend," said his pal of three decades, Michael Murphy. "Now he is my hero."