Courtney McGrailThe voices of those who spent the last hours with 9/11 chaplain Fr Mychal Judge have been gathered in a new book
“It’s going to be a beautiful day today – sunshine throughout. Low humidity. Really a splendid September day. The afternoon temperature about 80 degrees. Great weather for a primary election.
It was as promising as television forecasts got at that time of year. On September 11, 2001, the early morning sun glistened over the windows of the World Trade Centre, where, on a normal weekday, up to 50,000 people could be at their desks and 140,000 tourists might be riding the elevators to the observation decks. Few suites were unoccupied.
The tenants included 430 companies from 28 countries, a nerve centre for banking, finance, insurance, import, export custom brokerage, bond trading and transportation. Work had begun at the site in 1966 and the towers had opened to the public in the 1970s. At the time of the 1993 bombing, a structural engineer claimed that each tower had been built to withstand the impact of a fully-fuelled 707 jet.
That fall morning, pilot’s son and Franciscan priest Brian Carroll headed off from West Thirty-First Street, where he lived in community with Fr Mychal Judge. Walking briskly east at a quarter to nine, Carroll suddenly noticed a plane flying unusually low near the tower blocks and wondered if a TV company was making an extravagant commercial.
Turning on to Sixth Avenue and moving south, he heard “a deep noise that sounded like a train” and then watched in disbelief as the plane crashed into the North Tower at an estimated speed of 500mph. A fireball and clouds of gushing black smoke accompanied a muffled explosion. Shocked and trembling, Carroll rushed back to the friary and raced up to the third floor, banging on Mychal Judge’s room and pushing the door open. The fire chaplain was sitting calmly, holding his head in his hands.
“Mychal – I just saw a plane fly into the World Trade Centre,” Carroll blurted.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Judge responded, intermingling this reaction with an earthier phrase or two. “You’re kidding me.”
“Mychal, honest to God. I’ve just seen this. It’s unbelievable.”
“Oh, my God, oh, my God.” Judge repeated the expression like a mantra but was interrupted by his beeper. This was no joke. Carroll wished his friend luck as the priest quickly changed into his heat-resistant uniform and ran out of the building with the words “I think they need you” ringing in his ears. He crossed to the Engine 1/Ladder 24 firehouse to get his car. Captain Danny Brethel, who had just finished his 24-hour shift, offered to drive him down. Neither was to return.
Choking smoke
The New York Fire department mobilised hundreds of firefighters from Lower Manhattan, who were joined by units from across the five boroughs. Tyrone Johnson remembered seeing Fr Mike outside the burning World Trade Centre. As clouds of choking smoke obliterated an azure sky, flames licked their way across the towers. People on fire jumped to their deaths. It was reminiscent of a scene from Dante’s Inferno.
“When we pulled to our command post, Fr Mike was standing there with the chiefs, looking at what was going on,” said Tyrone Johnson. “He was standing there comforting people as would normally do. He was very serious. I had never seen such a grim look on his face. It was one of sorrow. He was really upset. I was standing five feet away from him at the time. As people were jumping out the buildings, you could see him praying for them.”
One of the first to speak with the chaplain was the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani. As Fr Mike ran by, Giuliani put a hand on his shoulder: “Mychal, please pray for us.” With a big, but anxious, Irish smile, he replied: “I always do.” Then he ran on with the firefighters into the lobby of the North Tower.
Never one to flinch from danger, Fr Mike was there to offer solidarity to the firefighters. Unlike the rest of the world, they had no wider perspective of the unfolding story. Film-make Jules Naudet, who happened to be at the centre making a documentary on a trainee firefighter, shot unique footage. He had to stay close to the battalion chief Joe Pfeifer, who had set up a command centre to coordinate the rescue effort. The camera captured the pandemonium surrounding fire chiefs as they scrambled together their rescue plan.
Their looks were not of fear but of incredulity and uncertainty.
The explosions blew out and splintered lobby windows. Some of those who leapt from the floors above crashed fatally into the remaining panes. Flaming jet fuel had shot straight through the elevator shaft. The elevators had stopped. The firefighters had to lug hose and equipment weighing more than 60 lbs up the stairs. Each flight took a minute to climb. The tower’s internal communication system had shut down so the men had to rely on their own radios. Despite the chaos, there was a calmness and orderliness about the operation.
Jules Naudet filmed Fr Mike in the lobby. Usually smiling to give the firefighters encouragement, he looked pale and preoccupied, praying and pacing, a lone spiritual presence amid the confusion and the conflagration. Some suggested he was saying the rosary. His white Roman collar seemed to stand out in the blackness of the hour. Occasionally his eyes looked up, as if toward Heaven. “I could tell he was praying,” said one firefighter. “Fr Judge would at least make eye contact with you and give you a reassuring look. This was not occurring – almost like he knew this was not good.”
Collapse
Eyewitnesses described the collapse of the South Tower, the second one to be hit, as being “a scene from Hell accompanied by a horrendous sound – like a locomotive tearing through the building”. Then a strange silence seemed to descend and hover over streets carpeted by glass shards, bricks, and twisted metal.
Fears grew about the fate of the burning North Tower, which was still standing. Early accounts suggested that when Fr Mike removed his helmet to pray the last rites over a dying firefighter (who had been crushed by a falling body), he was struck on the back of the head by falling debris and died. There would, however, have been no sacramental reason for his taking off the helmet.
But one firefighter remembered seeing the chaplain standing upright by the emergency command post and later in the lobby that was plunged into darkness when the South Tower collapsed. Christian Waugh told journalists: “I’m assuming he gave the last rites to the guy in Company 216 and then ran into the lobby, because I was with him in that lobby. He was standing there a few feet from me.”
Another report revealed that when Fr Mike had been urged to leave the building, he had said: “I’m not finished here.” Through the smoke and dust, Jules Naudet trained the light on his camera on the rescue operation. Amid the confusion of the scene, he was asked to tilt the light downward because a man had been injured. He was lying at the base of the elevator. Suddenly the light irradiated a white clerical collar. It was Fr Mike. A firefighter opened the priest’s shirt and checked for a pulse. But “he was gone”.
Eventually five rescue workers, including Lieutenant Billy Cosgrove, of the Manhattan Task Force, carried the body out through the rubble. It was at that moment that photographer Shannon Stapleton focused his lens on a tableau of pathos, a haunting picture that was to become iconic of the entire disaster. The body was placed on the corner of Church Street and Vesey Street in front of the burning towers.
The area was evacuated. People giving running commentaries to their friends on mobile phones started running for their lives. The smell of acrid smoke and the sound of piercing screams overpowered the senses. From the ground, the sky looked grey. It resembled nuclear snow or volcanic ash. “It was hard to see and hard to breathe – my eyes and lungs were burning,” said New York City police officer José Alfonso Rodríguez, who was helping with the evacuations when he suddenly spotted “a commotion” at the corner of Church and Vesey, where a body was lying close to a burned-out ambulance. When he first saw the figure in dark trousers, he thought it was a fellow police officer.
“Can somebody get this man a priest?” screamed Lieutenant Cosgrove. Rodríguez said he knew a church nearby. “Son, can you try to find this man a priest?”
Debris falling
Rodríguez told me how he raced one block north, dodging burning debris and falling bodies. He went into St Peter’s Catholic Church, where he spied a woman tearing up linen: “I asked if there were any priests around, but they were all out. I said we needed a priest to give somebody the last rites.
“The lady asked if I was a Catholic. I said I was. She said I could give the last rites in an emergency. I was really shocked to hear this. I ran back down the street and over to the lieutenant. I put my arm on him and told him what the lady had said. I asked him if he too was Catholic and he said he was.” Rodríguez offered to pray with Cosgrove. The two policemen walked over to the body. A blue jacket shrouded his head.
“We knelt down. I grabbed Fr Judge’s hand and the lieutenant put his hand on the priest’s head. We were still looking up at the burning North Tower. We said a quick Our Father and a Glory Be. I think the lieutenant said: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” I felt like an altar boy again. My heart was pumping out of my chest because my adrenalin rates were running so high. After praying over the body, we got back up and gave each other a little hug. We left the body right there. It looked like he was sleeping. I did not know what his injury was. I had never met the man and did not know his name, but I had seen him on emergencies before.
“We both went back into the North Tower and inside the lobby again. People were screaming. ‘The building’s moving. The building’s moving. Get out! Get out!’ We ran out into the plaza again. We started walking away. We looked up. The sky was pitch black. It looked like a ceiling with smoke pouring out. We couldn’t see the top of the tower and the blue sky beyond it. We just saw the building opening up and all the smoke. Then it started collapsing. For a second the smoke cleared, and I saw the tower antennas move. I knew it was coming down. I ran. Stuff was hitting us in the back. Glass was flying. Huge chucks of debris were falling all around us, and there was fire.
“I hid inside a building that was itself burning. With the tower coming down, I thought that was it. There’s no way we’re getting out. I’m going to die here. It seemed like the end of the earth. I wasn’t scared at all up until the collapse of the North Tower. It imploded and landed on Vesey and Westy Street. If the tower had fallen east, I would have been crushed.
“But we had a guardian angel that took care of us. The lieutenant and I think Fr Judge smiled down on us and made sure we got out.”
A bond grew between the two men. They discussed whether, as lay people, it had been legitimate to perform this ‘last rites’ ceremony. “I talked to a bishop who was sent as an emissary from the Pope himself,” Rodríguez explained. “He said technically I couldn’t give the last rites, but then he began to get emotional. He knew Fr Judge and said it was the greatest thing we could have done.”
The impromptu ritual was, in fact, entirely in keeping with Fr Mychal’s own sacramental theology of hallowing the moment and was typical of the way ordinary people generated light in the darkness of that day.
José Alfonso Rodríguez, who described himself as a lapsed Catholic, found his own faith in God strengthened by the experience – yet it remained a mystery: “I am just a lowly cop. Why me? Why was I there? How did I cross paths with this man? Why did the lieutenant scream for a priest when I was the one other cop there? Was it my Catholic calling?”
Rodríguez showed me what he had been wearing around his neck that day: a silver crucifix, a silver Jerusalem cross, and a silver medallion of St Michael, patron saint of New York police officers. The words ‘Protect Us’ were inscribed on the medallion. It was only afterward he had remembered about the chains. It was exactly the sort of spiritual connection that would have pleased Mychal Judge.
Firefighters took Fr Mike’s body to St Peter’s Church, where it was laid in front of the altar. They covered it with a white cloth and placed his stole, helmet and chaplain’s badge on top. Then they knelt and prayed. The fire chaplain had laid down his life for his friends, the ultimate mark of Christian discipleship. The friar from ‘Manhattan 10001’ was classed as the first registered victim of the attacks. His death certificate was 00001, a posthumous honour for a New Yorker whose proud boast was that he dwelt in “the greatest city in the world”.
Back at the friary, friends were already sensing the worst. Brian Carroll, who had been the first to break the news of the attack that morning, stood outside St Francis Church with a colleague. They looked at each other, and he said: “Something bad has happened to Mychal.”
At that moment the pastor, Fr Peter Brophy, and another friar came through the doors and, with neither a word nor a glance, walked by and headed across the street to the firehouse. A few hours later the body, dressed in its white sheet, was brought back to the firehouse and laid out on a table. Friars gathered around, praying and crying.
“My first thought on leaving the firehose was ‘My God, it’s all over’,” Carroll recalled. “I actually felt a sense of peace and comfort for Mychal. I actually laughed as I caught the eyes of one of the other friars and said, ‘This is how he would have scripted the end’. The silence of the streets, now almost completely empty on this beautiful September day, mirrored the silence in my heart.”
There was a stillness on West Thirty-First Street. Carroll looked up at the windows of Mychal Judge’s room and thought: “You’re at peace now.” His struggles and anxieties, his “worrying about doing the right thing and obsessing” were also laid to rest that day. He died doing what he loved to do – being alongside others in need. Such natural compassion had always given him moments of freedom from his own inner demons.
Mychal Judge had always stood shoulder to shoulder with other pilgrims in life – the frightened, the confused, and the battle weary. Now he was at peace and perhaps, for the first time, was experiencing what it was like to be on the receiving end of his own brand of unconditional love.
A photograph of Fr Mike was posted at a sidewalk shrine outside the firehouse, alongside pictures of the local firefighters who had lost their lives. Fr Brophy commented: “There is a lot of sadness because this is a tremendous loss, but the manner in which Mychal died is also honour because he died in service. As a friar I’m honoured by who he was and how he reached out to people, no matter who they were.”
It seemed, however, that it was indeed a death he would have chosen. As Stephen Weaver, a priest from London, watched the pictures on TV, he instinctively knew Mychal Judge would have been at the centre of the disaster: “I began to fear that he was indeed caught up in it and, when news came of his death, I was strangely unsurprised. The manner of his passing was entirely in keeping with the manner of his life – high profile, dynamic, heroic, and self-sacrificial.
“There was something Christlike about the way in which his death was a transcending of the disaster. It has since given people a great sense of inspiration that this person, who was a victim, is also someone who can be claimed as a hero and, in some senses, a saint. Heroic virtue was demonstrated by Mychal on that day in a way that redeems the evil of the event itself.
Stephen Weaver later reflected ironically that, if Mychal Judge had not been killed at the base of the Twin Towers that day, he would have been “furious with himself”, given his absolute dedication to duty. He would have wanted to be fully part of the experience, one shared not only by the firefighters he was ministering to, but by his city and country. “As the events unfolded, all the world’s cameras were already fixed on that place. As if in a drama, Mychal walked into the heat of the action and performed that heroic act. He would have been pleased to think this as the case. Even as he was losing his life, he was gaining this sense of a fitting end, placing the Franciscan spirit and Christian love at the heart of the tragedy.”
Extracted with permission from Father Mychal Judge: An Authentic American Hero, by Michael Ford. Paulist Press