Saint Mychal Judge?
Saint Mychal Judge?
After eighteen years of remembering 9/11, distance should bring greater clarity. Of course, some of the details of that cataclysm will likely seem ancient history to younger generations, such as the name Fr. Mychal Judge. But such reflection might cast fresh light to those who recall that name well, but also presenting an uncanny parallel to today’s fraught times.
By this time Father Mychal Judge is renowned the world over for his priestly ministrations and tragic death on September 11th, 2001. Images of Father Judge being carried by New York firemen, head slumped, bearing his slightly tilted fire helmet, are now iconic. Long after concerns raised by columns like this, the priestly body of Father Judge carried in makeshift procession will rise as one of the riveting moments of American history, like the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. It will act as a woodcut memorializing the heroism of Catholic priests, pressed like a palimpsest against the Priestly Crises of our times.
Even so, it would be remiss for Catholics to leave unaddressed certain anomalies regarding the public priestly persona of Father Judge. Accompanying all of Father Judge’s acts of mercy was his not so hidden homosexuality. One ought to carefully note the paean in New York’s Village Voice (September 19-25, 2001):
“To friends he was known as a gay man who appreciated the Gay USA show and celebrated the City’s “gorgeous men” by saying, “Isn’t it wonderful?!” When his close friend, gay activist Brendan Fay, started a St. Patrick’s parade in Queens last year that included gay groups, Judge helped him fund it and showed up in his brown friar’s robes to put the church on the side of the oppressed, even as Catholic officialdom was urging a boycott. He frequently donated clothes to the Out of the Closet Thrift Shop for gay and AIDS causes on East 81st street. He was a long-time member of Dignity, the gay Catholic group. In recent years, he came out to many of those he loved, including Fire Commissioner Tom von Essen, who warmly accepted him.”
Most certainly, in matters of this sort a sharp clarity and careful delicacy is required. No man is without sin, or its inclinations. Priests are no different. Struggles against our sins is the arena of sanctity, priests not excepted. Soaring drama has frequently been created out of such struggles: Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest, Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Powers’ Morte d’Urban. Common to all of these is the priest’s passionate love of Catholic truth. Dramatic tensions arise from his keen awareness of how distant his personal life has strayed from that truth. In that tension lies his agony, but also his triumph. No drama can be present in the life of a priest who desires to only rewrite the truth, not die for it.
In Father Judge’s decision to publicly disclose his homosexuality, it is feared that noble struggle mutated into vain performance. Father Judge crossed a moral Rubicon. Heroism against volcanic carnality seemed to become complacency in a corrosive gay ideology. Moreover, the Catechism declares homosexuality to be “objectively disordered” (#2358), and, in another place, “a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil” (Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, # 17). All recent attempts at theological legerdemain notwithstanding, these magisterial pronouncements still obligate filial submission.
Perplexing, isn’t it, that Father Judge would allow that moral weakness to be advertised? Unless, perhaps, to make it more palatable. One wonders. It must be made absolutely clear that no imputation of sin is being made against Father Judge. No one but God knows those things. All that is being imputed here is a witting (or unwitting) collapse to ideology. For a priest, that is almost as bad as sin. Arguably, it is sin.
Sufficient evidence exists for such claims. The New York Times cited a friend of Father Judge: “What his life says is ‘Yes, you can be gay and good, you can be homosexual and holy’, said Brendan Fay, a gay rights advocate who was a friend of the priest’s” (September 27, 2001.) The next paragraph of the same story reports: “Friends recall how Father Judge had invited the AIDS ministry of Dignity, a gay Catholic organization, to operate out of St. Francis. Mr. Fay said Father Judge marched in an alternative St. Patrick’s Day in Queens that included gays.”
How very curious, a priest in a gay pride parade? Ought not priestly compassion for those oppressed by vice, or even injustice, be applied in the confessional box? Of course, the rabid anti-Catholicism alone of such parades ought to proscribe the participation of any priest. Did this obvious fact elude Father Judge?
And what of Dignity? How could Father Judge not have known about the anti-Catholic posturing of Dignity? Dignity is a misnamed “Catholic” organization lobbying for some 30 years for the Church’s accommodation of the gay ideology: that homosexual acts are gestures of love and therefore stand squarely alongside the sexual acts of marriage. Dignity’s agenda differs not an iota from the secularist gay one. It fails to understand that the Catholic Church opposes the gay agitprop, not the homosexual person. Dignity, along with the secular gay front and fellow travelers, does not. This is a flagrant affront to Catholic sexual teaching. It dares nor be taken lightly. Could it have missed the attention of Father Judge?
Father Judge’s missteps seems to fit into a more general pattern noticeable in not a few areas of mainstream Franciscanism (for this reason, many reform Franciscan groups have recently appeared.) For example, Father John Felice, accepting an award on behalf of the fallen FDNY fire chaplain in April 2002, seemed to speak in coded ambiguity: “There is a rush to canonize Mychal these days and I think that is a mistake. In making saints out of people we often shove them away from our experience and place them on a pedestal. He was a very human, flawed, complex person just like the rest of us.” QED.
One is tempted to dismiss all of this as caviling, at best, a violation of de mortuis nihil bonum, at worst. Yes, that is, until a piece appears like the one in the National Catholic Reporter on May 17th, 2001. It contained not an ounce of ambiguity. Brother Jack Talbot, a member of the Capuchin Franciscans, headquartered in Detroit, declared himself “out of the closet”, as a “gay friar.” Might not a Catholic be somewhat wary of the wholesale use of a vocabulary so intimately wedded to a secular movement at war with the Catholic Church? Shouldn’t that wariness extend to a boastfulness about an inclination the Catholic Church declares “gravely disordered”? What of those more tender Catholic souls who smart at such bold admissions, or even suffer scandal? But Brother Talbot is not finished: “Human sexuality is the font of all that centers and propels us. I invite our gay brothers and sisters to ‘come out”. Tell your sacred stories to others.” In hindsight, don’t we see where this has led?
Now, all of that may be New Age coated Freudianism, but it isn’t Catholicism. Any alert Catholic cannot help but note the direction of the evidence. He would not be acting tendentiously, only clearheadedly.
May Father Mychal Judge rest in peace, and we leave him to the sweet mercies of the Savior, on Whose mercies we all depend. But Saint Mychal Judge. Isn’t that a bridge too far? That would be canonizing an “alternative Catholicism.” Let us be clear, an “alternate Catholicism” is not Catholicism. It is certainly not the stuff of saints. Nor, dare I say it, of faithful priests.
September 2019
