The Saint of 9/11, a new documentary about Father Mychal Judge, who worked tirelessly in New York to help others overcome addiction, poverty, and personal struggles before he became a symbol of the selfless heroes in the WTC attacks, makes the case for Judge's Sainthood, though the actual canonization process can take years.
It premiered last week at the Tribeca Film Festival. You can watch the trailer here.
Andrew Sullivan recently wrote a nice post on the film:
“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.”
Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal Bishop who recently went through rehab for alcoholism, commented on the controversy surrounding Judge's homosexuality, which struck a personal chord: “We all have closets of one kind or another. I think the danger in any religion is to take someone who is a leader in a faith tradition and put him on a pedestal and somehow he is not supposed to have any kind of a struggle.”
