Mychal Judge, The Saint of 9/11

Photo by Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

(This is a crosspost from 10ThousandCouples.com)

The body of Mychal Judge was tagged with the designation “Victim 0001”, as the first official casualty of 9/11. In the famous Shannon Stapleton/Reuters photo, he is being carried out of the lobby of the North Tower where he had been killed by debris from the collapsing South Tower. He was a Catholic priest of the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor assigned to the monastery at the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Manhattan on West 31^st Street. He was also a chaplain with the NYFD and one of the first responders to the attack on the twin towers. He was a recovered alcoholic and he was gay.

Now called the “Saint of 9/11”, Father Judge had earned a reputation for kindness and compassion that infused his ministry to the poor, addicts and persons living with AIDS.

Osama Bin Laden is Dead

by Ivan Vargas

I'm not one to celebrate the dead, but considering what happened on September 11, 2001, which not exactly a comedy in three acts with a happy ending, this will come as a form of closure to anyone who in one way or another found their lives turned upside-down by those events, and it comes near the ten-year mark of the fall of the Twin Towers in downtown Manhattan. In short, the man behind those attacks who proudly became the face of global terorrism, Osama Bin Laden, is dead.