The Saint of 9/11

Speaking of 9/11 films, The Saint of 9/11 opened at the Tribeca Film Festival with United 93, although it has gotten very little publicity in comparison. The film centers on the Catholic Priest, Mychal Judge, who ministered to firefighters in New York City and was killed on 9/11 when the south tower collapsed. The picture of his body (above) as it was pulled from the tower has been called The American Pieta, which is incredibly apt in my opinion.

I was deeply touched by the picture then and I am glad to hear the film about his life is just as moving. I would like to link to Andrew Sullivan's account of Judge and I will quote a portion of it here:

For me, his ministry to people with AIDS in the very early days means the most. We forget how terrifying HIV was in the early and mid 1980s, how patients would be quarantined in dark rooms, abandoned by their families, with their meals rolled into their rooms on trolleys. From the beginning, Mychal did as Jesus did and walked right in and kissed these frightened souls on the lips. If they recoiled from the sight of a priest - gay men at that time saw the church as an alien, hostile entity - he would persist in silence. He would simply bring holy oils, take a chair to the bottom of their hospital beds, and massage their bony, cold, pain-racked feet. He seemed to express no anger, just a kind of suspended joy in the moment, a joy he found resuscitated by the fact of the resurrection and the intercession of Our Lady. I wish I had met him. What a role model. But through this film, we do meet him, and see the face of God again, and laugh, and sigh.