Father Judge

I keep my clock radio tuned to NPR. The radio turns on as soon as my alarm goes off. I find that trying to process speech helps me get my brain working in the morning.

When I woke up this morning, the local NPR affiliate was broadcasting a piece on Father Mychal Judge, the Franciscan FDNY chaplain who was the first officially-tallied casualty of 9/11. Judge was something of a legendary good guy, and his funeral was attended by some three thousand people just four days after the attack.

The radio broadcast part of the service's homily, delivered by a fellow Franciscan named Michael Duffy:


"Mychal Judge’s body was the first one released from Ground Zero. His death certificate has the number one on the top. And I meditated on that fact of the thousands of people that we are going to find out who perished in that terrible holocaust. Why was Mychal Judge number one? And I think I know the reason. I hope you’ll agree with me. Mychal’s goal and purpose in life at that time was to bring the firemen to the point of death, so they would be ready to meet their maker...
 
Mychal Judge could not have ministered to them all. It was physically impossible in this life but not in the next. And I think that if he were given his choice, he would prefer to have happened what actually happened. He passed through the other side of life, and now he can continue doing what he
wanted to do with all his heart. And 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 he’s going to greet them with that big Irish smile. He’s going to take them by the arm and the hand and say, 'Welcome, I want to take you to my Father.' And so, he can continue doing in death what he couldn’t do in life."

I found myself getting choked up while listening to the homily. Not because of Father Judge—I'm sure that he was a very good person and that his death was a great loss for his community. But the man and his faith mean very little to me.

It upset me because Duffy's homily was so beautiful. He made Judge's death sound poetic, fitting. The reasoning appeals even to me, though I don't believe in life after death. I find myself thinking about the friends and families of the thousands of others who died that day. Most of them wouldn't be able to come up with such a lovely justification for the loss of their loved ones. They don't have that luxury.

If asked, most of them would probably say that all those lives were extinguished for no reason at all.