Following his footsteps

New FDNY chaplain follows his late friend and mentor.

By Larry McShane ~ The Associated Press

NEW YORK -- The Rev. Chris Keenan walked into a Manhattan firehouse 10 months ago to find his sad premonition proven true: His friend of 38 years, Fire Department chaplain Mychal Judge, was killed at the World Trade Center.

Very quickly, "Father Mike" became a Sept. 11 icon, a candidate for canonization. And just as swiftly, Keenan emerged as a candidate to replace the martyred Judge -- a thought that left the would-be successor "anxious and afraid."

How to follow a putative saint? How to handle all the grief and loss?

Barely two months later, the 60-year-old Keenan found that "serenity and peace" had replaced his fears. In a ceremony at fire headquarters, he received FDNY chaplain's shield No. 24 -- becoming the department's Friar Tuck, as he wrote in a letter to friends.

The Franciscan priest was soon pulling a rake through the rubble at ground zero, working nights with a group of retired firefighters desperately hunting their sons' remains.

Now eight months on the job, Keenan views his change of heart as a kind of destiny. Keenan has embraced the family of 11,000 surviving firefighters, hundreds of fire widows, and 1,335 fatherless children.

"Who has it better than me, being with awesome people like them?" he asks with a smile. "It's an honor and a gift, it truly is."

It's also an odd match. Keenan was never a fire buff, couldn't tell the difference between an engine and a ladder truck. A suburban kid, he had no knowledge of the city's firehouse culture.

And Keenan was unsure if he was ready for the hectic job of chaplain, handled by a seven-member team representing various faiths.

At the Franciscans' 31st Street friary, Keenan performed quieter work with the dispossessed: helping homeless children in city shelters, working the daily bread line.

But it turned out the chaplain's job in the post-Sept. 11 world was changed, and had little to do with fire.

"It's the morgue, and notifications, and wakes, and funerals," he says, reciting the sad litany of duties. "Burn units, counseling centers, meetings with the 343 families who lost firefighters.

"It's like fires are a footnote."

Born at a Salvation Army hospital in Manhattan, Keenan grew up in New Jersey. Like his Irish immigrant father, he worked as a Teamster. But Keenan found his vocation during talks with a local Franciscan working his first parish: Mychal Judge.

Judge was a fastidious soul, a dandy in a brown friar's robe and sandals, a man who loved the spotlight.

Even in death he was at center stage: Killed by a falling object, he was the first official victim of the terrorist attacks on the trade center. A photo of rescue workers carrying Judge's body away from the site was compared with the Pieta; a contingent of New York firefighters delivered Judge's fire helmet to Pope John Paul II in the Vatican.

Keenan's style is more casual. His gray hair shows no glint of hair spray, a Judge staple. On a warm July day, Keenan wears shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, his sandals the only sign of his order.

One of Keenan's first forays as chaplain was to ground zero, where he labored three nights a week. He occasionally uncovered small bits and pieces of lost lives: a worn Polaroid of a woman, an ID card. He watched in awe as the workers toiled around the clock, day after week after month, digging.

"They brought meaning to absolute, confounding devastation," he says, his eyes welling up. "I don't know how to explain it."

When Keenan leaves ground zero, it never fully leaves him. At a recent lunch with his niece and nephew, he and a waitress began crying as the children studied a Fire Department patch with the twin towers intact on the New York skyline.

"You hit those moments," he explains in measured tones. "It's just really tough."

Keenan was not entirely unprepared for emergency work.

While in Boston in the early 1980s, he volunteered to counsel terminally ill young people -- the first wave, it turned out, of the AIDS crisis.

"I journeyed with over 200 people from diagnosis to death," Keenan recalls. "It's an incredible resource, to know how to deal with that absolute devastation."

As his early work among AIDS patients indicates, Keenan's career is far from typical.

He earned a doctorate. He was ordained by future Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. He took Lamaze classes with an unwed mother, and cut the umbilical cord after attending the birth of a friend's child.

He traveled the country, never dreaming of returning to his native New York.

But when his parents became ill, he moved into the midtown Manhattan friary in September 1997. He discovered a love for the city -- "I'd had such a culturally deprived existence" -- and a love for his outreach programs.

He's feeling the same way about his new job.

Keenan has befriended the firefighters across the street at Engine Co. 1/Ladder Co. 24.

Although his rank is technically deputy chief, Keenan considers himself the FDNY's oldest "probie" -- the department's term for its rookies, probationary firefighters.

Recently, the firehouse guys gave Keenan the traditional probie hazing: They dumped a bucket of water on the priest from a second floor window.

"There could be no better replacement for Father Mychal," says firefighter Jimmy Hosford.

His ascension to the chaplain's job brings Keenan full circle from his Jersey days with Judge. "He got me in the business," Keenan says. "I used to tell him he had to live with his mistake."

Up the block is a sign -- literally -- of Judge's new status. At the corner of Seventh Avenue and 31st Street, a signpost designates the block as "Father Mychal F. Judge Street."

Keenan is certain that his predecessor would support his decision to become chaplain.

"I know Mike would say to me, 'Chris, don't worry about filling anyone's sandals, particularly my own,"' Keenan says. '"Listen to these people in such a way that you hear what they're saying, so you know how to respond."'

Keenan pauses briefly, channeling his late mentor.

"'Enjoy them,"' he says, "'as much as I did."'