Francis DeBernardo - Mychal Judge: Take Me Where You Want Me to Go

Cover design by Red+Company. Cover illustration by Philip Bannister.

2022 by Francis DeBernardo

Published by Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, except brief quotations in reviews, without written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint Johns Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, MN 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935175

ISBN 978-0-8146-4420-1 978-0-8146-4444-7 (e-book)

In memory of my parents,

Anna, Celia, Jim,

who also gave their lives completely

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for their assistance in completing this project:

Father Joseph Nagle, OFM, and Brother Thomas Barton, OSF, for providing direction on Franciscan formation and spirituality.

James Gormally, a fellow writer, who allowed me to share my struggles with him.

Dr. Jerry Fath, a psychotherapist, for reviewing material on addiction and the AA movement.

Yvonne Altman OConnor, for her genealogical research in Ireland of Mychal Judges ancestry.

Shannon Chisholm, Hans Christoffersen, Peter Dwyer, Barry Hudock, and Stephanie Lancour, editors who provided patient guidance, support, and expertise.

My colleagues at New Ways MinistryDwayne Fernandes; Sister Jeannine Gramick, SL; Kevin C Molloy; Matthew Myers; Robert Shinefor allowing me the time and space to work on this book.

Michael Ford, for his fraternal encouragement.

Jocelyn Thomas, communications director of the Holy Name Province of the Order of Friars Minor, for connecting me with Franciscan friends who knew Fr. Judge.

And Flannery OConnor, who advised: Im a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound.... I write only about two hours every day because thats all the energy I have, but I dont let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesnt mean I produce much out of the two hours. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I dont think any of that was time wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you dont sit there every day, the day it would come well, you wont be sitting there.

CHAPTER ONE

Brooklyn Boy

An Irish Childhood

Although Mychal Judge was born in Brooklyn, New York, he might as well have been born in Ireland. In the midst of a city that defined the modern world, Judge was raised in a world of traditional culture that reflected small-town Irish life. The seeds of his adult life were planted and grew among the sidewalk cracks of New York City, much like the seeds sown in those days by farmers of County Leitrim, from which his parents emigrated, grew in the regions rocky, hardscrabble land. Ireland and New York City were two gravitational pulls that shaped and directed most of Judges personality, identity, and spirituality.

His Irish roots began with his parents, both of whom came from long-established farming families. Mary Ann Fallon came from the village of Kilmore, and Michael Judge was from Keshcarrigan, in the same county, but about fifty miles apart from each other. In 1921, they met on the steamship that was bringing them both across the Atlantic Ocean to the new world of dreams. Like most European immigrants of the time, they both were looking for a better life than their homeland could offer. Michaels families were farmers, and Mary Ann had served in the Cumann na mBan, the Irish Republican Army womens division, and later worked as a domestic. When they arrived in the United States, great opportunity was not abundant, nor did their steamship introduction immediately blossom. They ended up settling in separate cities: Mary Ann in Brooklyn, working as a domestic, and Michael in Providence, Rhode Island, employed as a laborer. On weekends, Michael would visit Brooklyn and walk up and down past the home where Mary Ann worked, waiting for both the courage and opportunity to speak with her. After an eight-year courtship, they were married on August 30, 1929, at St. Anselms Parish in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, a strongly immigrant Irish community.

After marriage, the Judges set up household near downtown Brooklyn, in what is now known as the Cobble Hill neighborhood. It was an enclave for European immigrants, many from Ireland. Their home was not far from the waterfront that overlooked the lower tip of Manhattan where the World Trade Center would eventually be built decades later. The center of the neighborhood community was St. Pauls Church on Congress Street, built a century earlier on land donated by Cornelius Heeney, the wealthy Irish immigrant who also donated the land for Manhattans St. Patricks Cathedral, the strongest and most enduring symbol of Irish identity in New York City.

Very quickly, the Judge family began to grow. After a year of marriage, the couple had a daughter, Erin. A few years later, a son, Thomas Emmett, was born, but he died at fifteen months from an ear infection that spread to his mastoid bone. On May 11, 1933, Mary Ann again went into labor, and the future Franciscan was born. Her labor, though, would not end until two days later when his fraternal twin sister, Dympna, was born on May 13.

The history of Irelands political struggles had a role in the young boys name. He was baptized Robert Emmett Judge, for the early-nineteenth-century Irish patriot Robert Emmet, who, though Anglican, sympathized with his Catholic countrymen and helped lead a rebellion against the British in 1803. The Judge family called the young boy Emmett. (Mychal would come years later, after a few name changes in religious life.)

Perhaps it was the fabled luck of the Irish that helped the family just a year after the twins were born. They had a winning ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes, which had been established just four years earlier by the Irish government to benefit Irish hospitals, with tickets sold around the world. The prize of 514 Irish pounds (around fifty thousand US dollars today) was enough to allow the family to own two luxuries that most immigrants could only dream of: a car and a house.

Like many Catholic immigrants, the familys life was centered around the local parish, which helped them maintain strong ties to old world traditions. While faith was central to their lives and identity, Mary Ann, who became a full-time homemaker after marriage, did not have the fearful respect for the clergy that many Irish immigrants had. She believed the local Irish clergy should have provided more comforting pastoral care to parishioners instead of the strict rules that they enforced. It was not uncommon for her to strongly criticize the pope, bishops, priests, nunsa forthrightness almost unheard of from devout Catholics of that era but perhaps not surprising from a veteran of the Cumann na mBan.

Criticism of the churchs leaders did not interfere with her deep and abiding Catholic faith. Praying was a continuous part of Mary Anns day, her prayers repeated softly, rhythmically, under her breath. The future priest would later describe how his mothers prayer form had a rhythm to it, a magic to it, and that somehow it became part of me. Her connection to God was intimate and personal. Church structures were superfluous to her expression of faith.

Mary Anns antagonism toward clerical figures could only mean that she must have been filled with great consternation when the toddler Emmett, when asked about his dreams for the future, routinely would answer, I wanna be a peest. Despite his inability to correctly pronounce the word priest , his decisiveness about a clerical vocation was early, strong, and lasting.