Father Mychal Judge was officially recorded as Victim 0001 on September 11, 2001.
He was an FDNY chaplain.
A Franciscan friar.
And he was gay.
But long before his name became tied forever to the attacks on New York, Mychal Judge had already spent years showing up for people who were sick, frightened, grieving and often pushed to the margins.
During the AIDS crisis, that included gay men who sometimes felt rejected or abandoned by the institutions around them.
A Priest Who Went Toward People In Pain
Judge was born in Brooklyn in 1933 and entered the Franciscan order as a young man.
His ministry eventually brought him to New York City, where he became known for an unusually direct and personal way of caring for people.
He visited hospital rooms.
He prayed with people who were dying.
He sat with partners, friends and families.
And when AIDS devastated gay communities in the 1980s and 1990s, Judge became deeply involved in ministry to people living with HIV and AIDS.
He helped establish a Franciscan AIDS ministry that provided practical support as well as spiritual care.
People could receive food, toiletries, prayer and companionship.
Sometimes the most important thing Judge offered was simply his presence.
He once told a young volunteer who worried about not knowing what to say to dying patients that if the words did not come, the answer was simple: just be present.
That idea would become a defining theme of his life.
He Was Gay Too
Judge was gay, something known to close friends and later documented by biographers and people who knew him.
He did not live as a publicly out gay priest in the modern sense.
But he was connected to gay Catholic communities and was open about his sexuality with some of the people closest to him.
That gave his AIDS ministry an especially personal dimension.
He was not simply serving a community from the outside.
He understood something about the fear, secrecy and exclusion many gay men were living with.
And he kept showing up.
September 11, 2001
By 2001, Judge was serving as chaplain to the New York City Fire Department.
When hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, he went downtown with firefighters and other emergency workers.
He entered the North Tower area and ministered to the injured and dying as the disaster unfolded around him.
Judge was inside the lobby when the South Tower collapsed.
The force of the debris killed him.
He was 68 years old.
His body was carried from the rubble by firefighters and other emergency personnel in an image that became one of the most haunting photographs of September 11.
His death was officially recorded as Victim 0001.
That designation did not mean he was definitively the first person to die in the attacks.
It meant he was the first victim formally recorded by the medical examiner.
A Life Of Showing Up
Twenty-five years later, the FDNY is again honoring Judge’s life and legacy.
But the story of Mychal Judge did not begin at Ground Zero.
It began in hospital rooms.
In churches.
With men dying of AIDS.
With partners and families who needed somebody willing to sit beside them.
With firefighters who knew their chaplain as someone who would come when things were at their worst.
That is what makes his final day feel less like an exception and more like the culmination of a pattern.
When people were afraid, Judge went toward them.
When people were sick, he stayed.
When people were grieving, he listened.
And on September 11, when New York was in chaos, he went where he had always gone.
Toward the people who needed him.
Father Mychal Judge.
1933–2001. ❤️🌈
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