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Postscript
- University of Notre Dame Press
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Postscript Ten years after September 11, 2001, the world continues to observe with reverence the memory of the victims whose martyrdom will be a symbol of freedom, justice and true peace against all those who defy God’s greatest gift of life. —Archbishop Hovnan Derderian Father Mychal Judge was the first officially documented fatality of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. By Archbishop Derderian’s account, Judge was a martyr—unlike Father John Gerard, with whose story this book began.1 Judge was a Franciscan friar and a chaplain with the New York City Fire Department who was killed at Ground Zero when the south tower of the World Trade Center fell. In the aftermath of his death, the public learned that Judge was gay, although celibate; his gay identity is a central topic of the 2006 documentary Saint of 9/11, a filmic hagiography celebrating Judge’s service to marginalized populations of New York City, especially his dedication to gay Catholics and AIDS patients.2 Ignored by the Roman Catholic Church, whose condemnation of homosexuality Judge disregarded in his ministry, he was canonized by the Orthodox Catholic Church of America in 2002. An Orthodox parish in Lexington, Kentucky, which 246 describes itself as “alternative, collaborative, and progressive,” has taken him for their patron, naming their congregation St. Mychal the Martyr Parish.3 The sanctuary features an image of Judge wearing Franciscan robes and encircled by a nimbus. He holds his right hand up in benediction and carries an FDNY helmet in his left.4 What makes Judge a martyr? Is it his priesthood? His homosexuality ? His affiliation with the fire department? His death in a terrorist attack? His death in this particular terrorist attack? The terrorists’ Islamic beliefs? These are questions that the biography of Judge published by St. Mychal the Martyr Parish does not fully answer. The parish website states: “The word martyr comes from the Greek word for witness. Mychal Judge was a true martyr who died bearing witness to God’s mercy and beneficence, after a long life living the same way. . . . The word martyr has been twisted out of shape in the 21st century as religious extremists throughout the world try to impose their version of God’s will.This joyful Franciscan friar from New York can remind us of the stuff of which martyrs are really made and challenge us to witness to God’s compassion, however mad our world may seem.”5 This explanation of Judge’s martyrdom is at once intensely aware of and altogether indifferent to the historicity of the term and to the formal and circumstantial conventions that govern martyr-making. On the one hand, by invoking the Greek etymology of the term “martyr,” the passage acknowledges the necessary continuity between old and new martyrs and the need to situate Judge legibly in relation to traditional representations. The distinction made between its own claims and the contemporary construction of martyrdom that the passage rejects depends on the logic of tradition: the martyr is an inherited figure whose identity hinges on his or her coherence with originary constructs.The parish biography suggests, thereby, that innovation and misappropriation result in illegitimate claims to martyrdom. On the other hand, a number of significant elisions must occur in order to make Judge fit the conventional martyr-making discourse the parish website invokes. The notion of witnessing is signally abstracted from the Christian tradition of active, explicitly religious persecution and summoned broadly to describe an individual who did not die for the faith per se—the sine qua non of conventional martyrdom—but Postscript | 247 instead while performing his professional, albeit religious, duties. Moreover , when the events of history—both the history of the martyr figure and the history of Judge’s death—are generalized into the notion of “bearing witness to God’s mercy and beneficence,” the passage forecloses the questions of agency, doctrine, and circumstance that orga nize traditional martyr narratives. In order to define Judge in contrast to the “religious extremists throughout the world” whose martyrdoms it dismisses, the martyrology deployed by St. Mychal the Martyr Par ish must cancel the history of Christian extremism and the emphatic claims about God’s will that underlie it. The deaths described by the stable martyrological past to which the passage gestures are themselves nothing if not examples of religion in extremis, as narratives ranging from the Maccabees martyrs and Saint Laurence to John Hooper, Margaret Clitherow, Robert Southwell, and Christ...