Michael Daly - The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge

The

BookofMychal

The S URPRISING L IFE and H EROIC D EATH
of F ATHER M YCHAL J UDGE

Michael Daly

T HOMAS D UNNE B OOKS
S T. M ARTINS P RESS N EW Y ORK

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS .
An imprint of St. Martins Press.

THE BOOK OF MYCHAL . Copyright 2008 by Michael Daly. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Daly, Michael, 1952
The book of Mychal : the surprising life and heroic death of Father Mychal Judge / Michael Daly. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Thomas Dunne Books.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-30150-7 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-312-30150-2 (alk. paper)
1. Judge, Mychal, 19332001. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001Biography.
3. Catholic ChurchUnited StatesClergyBiography. I. Title.
BX4705.J767D35 2008
282.092dc22
[B] 2008019635

First Edition: September 2008

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my father, Charles U. Daly,
and my brother, Douglas Daly

This book would not have been possible without the generous help of Mychals sisters, Dympna and Erin, as well as the full spectrum of his many friends. I thank among many others Vina Drennan and young John and Adrienne and Justine and Jessica, Gladys Andersen, Steven and Patti Ann and Conor McDonald, Al Alvarado, Mike and Janet Brown, Tara Stackpole, Keith and Ellen McLaughlin, Beth Hatton, Jimmy Boyle, the Siedenburg family, the Valentino family, the Johnson family, Michael Walker, Addie LaPiedra, Connie Smith, Randi Wylie, Maura Lener, Brian Mulheren and John Mulheren, Michael Angelini, Michael Mulligan, the Smurr family, Craig Monahan, Chris Waugh, Father Chris Keenan, Father Pat Fitzgerald, Father Ron Pesci, Father John McNeill, Father Brian Jordan, Father Hugh Hines, Jean Willis, Kevin Shea, Bobby Burke, Pete and Rita Hayden, Liam Flaherty, Tim Brown, Jim Elison, Tim Grant, Steve Gonzalez, Steve and Danny Browne, Peter Michaels, Mickey Kross, Brendan Fay and Tom Moulton, Michael and Susan Madden, Mychal McNicholas, Tom Ferriter, Joe Bryant, the Carven family, Sister Pascal Conforti, David Dinkins, Sister Mary DeSales, Rev. Everett Wabst, Jimmy Gilfeather, Gerry Whelan, Gerry Adams, Cristyne Lategano Nicholas, Everald Brathwaite, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Brian Carroll, Mike Currid, Pat Kowalski, Al Fuentes, Tom Nerney, Mike Moran, John Ryan, Howard Safir, Tom Von Essen, and Steve Shlopak.

On the editorial side, I thank the people at Thomas Dunne Books, my determined editor, Rob Kirkpatrick (who kept the faith), as well as Lorrie McCann and Meg Drislane. I am forever grateful to Marianne Patridge for her editorial and spiritual guidance. I also thank the wise Dinah Prince Daly, Douglas Daly, Sinead Daly, Bronagh Daly, and the great Nancy Cardozo. And Flip Brophy proved once again that not all agents are in it just for the money.

And the biggest thanks go to the surprising one Mychal sometimes called the Boss.

I had been up with the dawn working on a political story for the New York Daily News when a cop friend called to tell me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I got to the scene as the South Tower collapsed. The North Tower came down twenty-nine minutes later. I ran for my life. I was still alive when the dust cleared.

How many people died back there? a firefighter from Engine 353 cried out. How many were lost?

The more dedicated and daring firefighters are the ones a city newspaper columnist gets to know, and I was sure many of them had been killed, along with thousands of other innocents. These included two dear friends who had parked their fire rigs side by side at the base of the North Tower. As the dust cleared, I saw that both rigs had been crushed.

I was still not prepared for what I heard when I encountered Deputy Chief Peter Hayden, who had commanded the rescue effort in the North Tower. Hayden said, Father Judge is dead.

I felt my knees give. A retired firefighter named Jimmy Boyle caught me. I was shamed, for his only son had been in the North Tower just a block from where we stood, and he was rock steady. I said, I loved Mychal Judge. Hayden said in a reproving tone, A lot of people loved Mychal Judge.

I had been introduced to Fire Chaplain Mychal Judge in 1994 by one of the steadiest of firefighters, Capt. Patrick Brown. I saw at fire scenes and at FDNY rites and ceremonies how much firefighters loved their Padre. Judge was the one to whom they turned after a tragedy to give it form and meaning. He also was able to get them laughing even at funerals.

On the night of the greatest tragedy ever to strike the city, I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge just as I sometimes had with Judge. My way home took me past the street where he was raised and the church where he said his first Mass. My firstborn had often waved to the religious bas relief out front, saying, Hi, Mary! Hi, Jesus! The Dalys only went to church for weddings and funerals.

But I always felt church had come to me when I encountered Mychal Judge, a church of life and love and laughter. I felt this way again the summer after 9/11 when I chanced upon a homeless man sprawled on the sidewalk a half block from the friary where Mychal had lived. The man was bare-chested, but wore three pairs of pants in the sweltering heat, none of which were zipped.

I handed him a neatly folded dollar bill and said, This is from Mychal Judge.

The man rose from the sidewalk and announced, Father Mychal Judge was my spiritual adviser.

With that, he scuffled down to a small courtyard adjoining the church and deposited the dollar in a collection box beside a bank of candles. He said not a word as he continued crosstown, tugging up his pants.

Mychal was also my spiritual adviser, and he taught me by example to look for what is best in people. I have sought to do that here for him with considerable help from his friends and fellow friars as well as his twin sister, Dympna. The Book of Mychal is also a book for Mychal, my friend Father Mychal Judge, the one and only.

T he first surprise was always the size and strength of his hands, hands that at the greeting clasp seemed meant for riveting the high steel or fielding a hot grounder, hands that blessed and anointed as if the spiritual were as actual as honest labor or tender sex. Hands that made the holy real, just as the hands of the firefighters waiting beside him prepared to make the real holy, hefting tools and tugging at air tank straps.

His own hands hung useless at his sides as he now stood on West Street in a Roman collar and a black standard-issue FDNY firefighters protective turnout coat, gazing from under the brim of his white fire helmet. He and the firefighters around him were witnessing an elemental law of nature by which a falling object accelerates at thirty-two feet per second minus the particular air resistance, be the object a lead weight dropped by Galileo from the Tower of Pisa or a human being leaping from the upper floors of One World Trade Center.

Male or female, young or old, healthy or ill, urban or suburban, black or white or Hispanic or Asian, married or single, parent or childless, straight or gay, rich or poor, generous or miserly, kind or cruel, fierce or meek, virtuous or sinful, dreamy or practical, toned or flabby, Christian or Jew or Muslim or Hindu, all fell at the same ever-increasing rate. The only variants were density and surface area. Mundane business papers wafted gently down, but even the most decent person was soon plummeting at nearly 150 miles per hour.