A body.
Everyone stopped. One of the firefighters aimed his flashlight low across the ground. A halo of light framed a man’s face. Everyone saw it. “Oh, my God,” they began to shout. “It’s Father Mike.”
He wasn’t buried under much rubble; his body, even his face, was still perfectly intact. They took his pulse. Nothing. “I took an arm,” says Cosgrove. “Someone else took an arm. Two other guys took his ankles.” Waugh grabbed him by the waist, and together the men carried him out of the building. They found a bunch of broken chairs on an outdoor plaza and nestled Judge in one of them, so that they could carry him down a staircase to the street.
That was the moment a Reuters photographer, Shannon Stapleton, snapped the picture that Christopher Keenan, one of Judge’s closest friends at the friary, now calls “a modern Pietà.”
The Rev. Mychal F. Judge, the Fire Department chaplain who died in the rubble of 9/11, was, and still is, one of the most widely loved Roman Catholic priests in New York City's recent history.
For 40 years, Father Judge tirelessly ministered to firefighters, their grieving widows, AIDS patients, homeless people, Flight 800 victims' families and countless others. At his funeral, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani called him a saint, a sentiment that admirers have followed up by campaigning for his canonization. A simple prayer that Father Judge wrote has been circulated around the world and attached to thousands of donations to the needy. Pope John Paul II accepted the gift of his helmet.
Father Mychal Judge was gay. Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church believe that Father Mychal Judge was unfit to be a Roman Catholic priest.
Here's an article by the New York Times.
