YOU might worry about both parties when a newspaper reporter admits to having a spiritual adviser, but it all worked out for the best for Michael Daly and especially his loyal readers.
Mr. Daly’s latest book is a marvelously revealing, inspirational, sensitive and surprisingly candid account of the life and good works of the Rev. Mychal Judge, the Franciscan friar and New York City Fire Department chaplain who died on Sept. 11, 2001, ministering to his extended flock at the World Trade Center.
Just in time for the holidays comes “The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge”. Father Judge was larger than life, a mythic holy man. Mr. Daly is a columnist for The Daily News, and his book accomplishes a minor miracle. To paraphrase Jim Dwyer of The New York Times, Mr. Daly rescues Father Judge from 9/11’s mythic piety by exposing and exploring his humanity.
Father Judge was as disconnected from the bureaucracy of the Catholic church as he was married to the church spiritually. He was a gentle and nonjudgmental man who, a priest who ran a shelter in Harlem for homeless people with AIDS, recalled, “used to put it to me, if you descend into somebody else’s private hell and stand there with them, it ceases to be hell.”
Mr. Daly’s affecting style bestows a surprising humaneness on mayors and commissioners and, through diary entries and other sources, reconciles Father Judge’s love of people generally, including the police officers and firefighters who lionized him, and his love of individuals.
“He seemed to them to be as close as any mortal could be to Christ on earth, and they did not even think of him as a sexual being, much less as gay,” Mr. Daly writes. “The very fact he could inspire them to believe caused him to fear that if he broke that spell they would feel betrayed and lose their faith.
“That they did not suspect, even after seeing his spectrum of guests get up and dance at the Emerald Society dinner, suggested how determinedly they believed their shape-shifting priest to be who they needed him to be.”
Father Judge was always who they needed him to be, and so is Mr. Daly.