The Secret of Father Judge

One of the more fascinating tales to emerge in the weeks following the World Trade Center attack involves the hero-priest Mychal Judge, who rushed to the scene and was killed by debris alongside firefighters.

Father Judge was gay.

What's fascinating is not Judge's sexual orientation, which is not disputed. Many knew he was gay, including New York City Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, who says Judge told him personally.

What's fascinating is the ho-hum reaction, even in the macho world of the fire department.

Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest and beloved fire chaplain, gave up his life while doing his job on Sept. 11. To firefighters and most everyone else, his sexual orientation did not matter. What mattered was his courage.

Fast forward now to the Vatican's reaction this month to widespread reports about sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic priesthood. Ignoring the church's own cover-up of the problem, the pope's chief spokesman instead targeted gays, declaring that gay men should never be ordained as priests not even if they adhere to a vow of celibacy, as Judge's friends say he did.

"People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained," said papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Vallis in an interview with The New York Times. "That does not imply a final judgment on people with homosexuality. But you cannot be in this field."

Such words beg a question: What about Mychal Judge? If Judge, 68 and a priest for some 40 years, had been defrocked merely because he was gay, New York's firefighters would have been deprived of their comforting chaplain. So would the families of those who died when TWA Flight 800 plunged into the Atlantic in July 1996. Judge offered free counseling for weeks at a Long Island motel.

Here in northern New Jersey, where Judge worked for almost 20 years, Catholic parishes in East Rutherford, Rochelle Park, and West Milford would have felt none of Judge's humanity, not to mention his spiritual guidance. In Manhattan, where he moved in 1986, all manner of ministries the homeless, alcoholics, AIDS, to name a few would have lost Judge's touch.

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