Saint of 9/11: Father Mychal Judge

b. May 11, 1933
d. September 11, 2001

Father Mychal Judge was a Franciscan priest and Fire Department of New York chaplain who died heroically on September 11, 2001. He has been called a "Saint of 9/11."

"The first thing I do each day is get down on my knees and pray, 'Lord, take me where you want me to go, let me meet who you want me to meet, tell me what to say, and keep me out of your way.' "

Shortly before entering the World Trade Center on 9/11, Father Judge rejected an offer to join Mayor Giuliani, choosing instead to step into harm's way to be with the FDNY and victims of the terrorist attack. A Reuters photograph of Father Judge's body being carried from Ground Zero by rescue workers made him an international icon of heroism.

Father Judge was a hero to many long before his death. He was beloved by Fire Department of New York personnel and their families and a champion of New York's homeless, AIDS patients, gay and lesbian Catholics, alcoholics, immigrants, and disaster victims.

Born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrant parents, he was only six when his father died after a long illness. As a boy, Judge was inspired to enter the priesthood by the Franciscan friars at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi near Penn Station in Manhattan.

In the early years of his ministry, Father Judge served two parishes in New Jersey, where he gained a reputation as "the listening priest." During his service as Assistant to the President of Siena College, Father Judge confronted his alcoholism and achieved sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous.

In the 1980's, Father Judge was among the first clergy to minister to AIDS patients, who at that time were considered untouchable. Through the organization Dignity, he ministered to gay and lesbian Catholics even after the Church excluded the organization from holding masses in New York churches.

In 1996 Father Judge led a memorial service on the beach at Smith Point, Long Island for the families of the victims who lost their lives in the nation's second worst air disaster, the explosion of TWA Flight 800. More than 2,000 people attended.

Father Judge received numerous posthumous honors, including France's highest recognition, the Legion of Honor. His FDNY fire helmet was blessed by Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.

Bibliography:

• Feister, John Bookser and John Zawadzinski, "No Greater Love: Chaplain Mychal Judge, O.F.M.," St. Anthony Messenger, Dec. 2001.
• Ford, Michael. Father Mychal Judge: An Authentic American Hero. New York: Paulist Press, 2002.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889) U.K. Poet, Jesuit priest

b. 28 July 1844 

d. 8 June 1889

In some of the most original poetry of the Victorian period, the sexually-repressed Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated male beauty as one of the most splendid witnesses to the divine.

Born at Stratford, Essex, Hpkins grew up in refined and pleasant circumstances. Always an exceptional student, he distinguished himself at Highgate School then, from 1833, at Balliol College, Oxford. Here he developed a deep infatuation for Digby Dolben, the cousin of his close friend and later literary executor, Robert Bridges. It was with Dolben that Hopkins came closest to physical relationship with another man.

According to his diary, Hopkins was unable to keep himself from masturbating after meeting Dolben, and he generally struggled with feelings of self-loathing because he was often excited and aroused by strangers.

He was converted in 1866 to Roman Catholicism, and in 1868 began to train as a Jesuit. He preached and ministered as a priest in Ireland and England and subsequently taught. He died of typhoid.

His poetry is profoundly religious and records his struggle to gain faith and peace, but also shows great freshness of feeling and delight in nature. A complete edition, including the perhaps best-known poems, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876), and The Windhover (1877), was issued in 1918. His employement of "sprung rhythm", allied to the Old and middle English alliterative verse, has greatly influenced later 20th century poetry.

He experienced a life-long tension between being a poet with homoerotic feelings, and a Jesuit priest. His poetry was written in secret, and published 30 years after his death by his friend Robert Bridges.His Journals and Papers were published in 1959, and three volumes of letters in 1955-56.

Giovanni Bosco

Giovanni was born to an impoverished rural family in Castelnuovo, Piedmont. Patronage from clerics allowed him to be ordained priest in 1841. He devoted himself to improve the life and education of the many homeless peasant teenage boys in and around Turin, hundred of whom were attracted to the city by the Industrial Revolution.

In 1864 he founded the Salesian Fathers religious order. At Bosco's death the Salesian "oratoires" numbered about 250. He was beatified in 1924, and declared a Saint of the Catholic church in 1934.

Bosco is one of the many homosexuals who found in the Catholic church a family and a "mission". Quite possibly he had an attraction to young boys which he succeeded in sublimating  into a socially useful undertaking.

(From  Aldrich & Wetherspoon, "Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to WWII")

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