On Sept. 15, 2001, thousands of people gathered to mourn Mychal Judge, O.F.M., the beloved chaplain to the Fire Department of the City of New York. The Church of St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street in Manhattan could not hold the massive crowd. So while the funeral Mass was being celebrated, Chris Keenan, O.F.M.—the man who would become Father Judge’s successor—was standing across the street, arm in arm with his neighbors, the firefighters of Ladder 24.

Days before, Father Keenan had been at the friary of St. Francis of Assisi on 31st Street, where he lived with his friend Father Judge. On Sept. 11, when the planes hit the World Trade Center, Father Judge rushed downtown to pray for those trapped inside the North Tower. When the South Tower collapsed, a blast of debris tore through the lobby and killed him. The number on his death certificate would read 0-0-0-1: the tragic day’s first recorded casualty. The photograph of rescue workers carrying his body through the wreckage would become one of the defining images of the attacks, one many called a modern-day Pietà.

Father Keenan, who retired from the chaplain role in 2022, remembers the hours that followed: watching the medical personnel who filled the streets, waiting with stretchers for people who never came; learning that his friend was dead; sitting with Father Judge’s body back at the firehouse.

And yet, despite being formed by that tragedy—despite the seven months he would spend helping search for remains at Ground Zero, and the dozen-plus medical conditions and cancers the toxins there later caused in him—Father Keenan remains a man of effusive joy.

Being the Bridge

Mychal Judge was an institution. People still carry his words written on paper folded in their wallets, pulling out a short prayer he wrote when Father Keenan mentions his name. Babies, boats and buildings have been named after him. “There’s not a day that goes by that he isn’t remembered,” Father Keenan said.

To follow Judge in his role as F.D.N.Y. chaplain, particularly in the wake of an unprecedented disaster, was no easy task. As Michael Daly, the longtime columnist in New York who chronicled the legendary chaplain’s life in The Book of Mychal, put it in an interview with America: “Imagine Joe DiMaggio gets killed in a terrorist attack, and I tell you, ‘OK, you’re up next.’”

On paper, Father Keenan may not have been an obvious choice. “I didn’t even know the difference between an engine and a ladder,” Father Keenan told America in June while seated in the friary on 31st Street where he lived while he was the F.D.N.Y. chaplain. But he was not an obvious pick to join the Franciscans either.

While he grew up in a Franciscan-run parish in the borough of Wood-Ridge, N.J., the future friar now says he “never intended to be a Franciscan.” He was working a teamster job in his early 20s when his vocation was first suggested to him by none other than Father Judge. “I said, ‘Well, I think you’re kind of crazy because, number one, I don’t go to church,” Father Keenan recounted. “Number two, I cheated my way through high school, so I could never do the studies. And number three, how do you spell chastity?’”

“And he said to me: ‘If I could do it, you could do it.’”

New York firefighters and rescue workers are seen Sept. 11, 2001, carrying Franciscan Father Mychal Judge, a chaplain with the New York Fire Department, who died while giving last rites to a firefighter following terrorist attacks that would soon bring down the twin towers of the World Trade Center. (OSV News photo/Shannon Stapleton, Reuters)

Judge turned out to be right. And Judge’s instincts would be right again almost a half century later. Months after Father Keenan became chaplain, a firefighter told him that Judge, when asked who might replace him, had named Father Keenan without hesitation.

The two men had a good deal in common. Both were Franciscans; both inherited the sort of natural charisma that came from being the sons of blue-collar Irish immigrants in New York; both had gotten sober after struggling with alcoholism, and both accompanied patients dying of AIDS when others would not go near them. 

But succeeding Judge was never a matter of replacement. “Nobody was ever going to be Mychal Judge,” said the Rev. Ann Kansfield, an F.D.N.Y. chaplain and the director of the department’s counseling services unit. “But Chris does ministry in a style that’s very reminiscent of Mychal…. A sort of Elijah-Elisha mantle passed between [them]. It was a miraculous blessing for the fire department: [Chris’s] ability to just be present with people, to love people.”

Mr. Daly resists the framing of Judge as a “towering” figure: “Mychal Judge did not think that the impressive or sacred distance was up or high. He thought it was across. What he loved more than anything was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. His whole idea was that a great figure is not a towering figure—a great figure is a bridging figure.”

Father Keenan, Mr. Daly said, embodied that philosophy but in his own way. He never tried to be “Mychal Judge 2.0.” Instead, “he served the same function that Mychal Judge did, which is the bridge from himself to other people…. And to Chris’s eternal credit, I’ve never seen him try to be anybody but himself. He never tried to be anybody but who God wanted him to be.”

His versatility would serve him in his role as chaplain. “Give me your most wild and wacky situation,” Rev. Kansfield said, “like if some guy was an atheist or Wiccan or died naked in a hooker’s bed…we could call Chris. Nothing is gonna surprise him.”

Digging in the Pit

“[Judge] was all about moments,” Mr. Daly said. “There were these things that happened that you would always remember. After 9/11, there was so much. It wasn’t about the moments, it was about the enormity of all the moments.”

By Father Keenan’s count, there were over 500 funerals and memorial services over the course of his first two years on the job. As remains from 9/11 victims were recovered, grief would come to the surface again and again. Most of those remains would be miniscule. “Everyone was essentially vaporized, pulverized and cremated in the collapse of the two buildings,” Father Keenan said. He participated in the recovery efforts, digging side-by-side with firefighters in the pit at Ground Zero for seven months after the attacks. They would search through dirt and debris in sections roughly the size of a basketball court and rake back and forth three times over, searching for remains. “You could hardly find a piece of glass,” he said.

Even there, while he was carrying the remains of fallen firefighters to ambulances, Father Keenan was able to find God. “I was wondering, what sense do I bring to this? What’s the meaning of this?” he said. But one night, “I had an inspiration from the spirit.” He described a dream where he was driving down into the pit to dig, “and I came to understand that I was descending into hell, but I’m seeing the face of God on all the people that are down here [to offer help].”

That community of first responders sustained him through tragedy. He recalled a conversation he had with firefighters soon after he became chaplain: “They said, ‘We know that you’ve given your life for us as our chaplain, but what you need to know is that all 11,000 of us are yours…. Don’t you ever forget that all 11,000 of us are yours.’”

“That’s beautiful,” Father Keenan said, smiling widely. “Who is ever told that? People ask me, ‘How did you move through all of this?’ That was how.”

In the Firehouse

Now in his retirement, those relationships continue to provide consolation, and not just for Father Keenan. Ted Trestik was a probationary firefighter on Ladder 24, across the street from the friary, when he first met the chaplain in the station kitchen about 12 years ago. 

“He’s been a great source of counsel for me before I even knew that’s what it was,” Mr. Trestik said. Father Keenan’s demeanor was so approachable that he didn’t realize at the time that he was getting advice. What made it possible, he said, was that “you can’t offend the guy. He’s heard it all, and he’s seen it all. It’s a nice feeling to know that you’re never going to be scolded or shamed.”

Mr. Trestik recalls Father Keenan telling him about feeling inadequate when he took on the role of chaplain after Father Judge. But despite his not feeling ready, “God, or whatever higher power you believe in, said, ‘Nope, it’s your time, whether you’re ready or not,’” Mr. Trestik said. “[Father Keenan] showed a lot of guys that if you just try to do the next right thing, you’ll be OK, even if you’re not ready or are unsure. He showed guys that it is OK to be a little broken.” Father Keenan’s vulnerability, Mr. Trestik explained, made him a trusted voice in the fraternity of the fire department.

“I’d do anything for Father Chris,” Mr. Trestik added.

Michael Zofchak, a now-retired F.D.N.Y. lieutenant, got to know Father Keenan when he and his wife, who is Jewish, were having trouble finding a priest to preside at their wedding in 2003. “I said, ‘You know what? We have a fire department calendar with all the chaplains on the back of the calendar. Let’s pick the Jewish one and the Catholic one.’”

Since then, Father Keenan became a fixture in their family, coming to everything from funerals to Jewish baby naming ceremonies. “He really gets in the weeds with you and your family,” Mr. Zofchak said. The “source of comfort” that Father Keenan provided was all the more important in a department where, as Mr. Zofchak said, “the way we do therapy is we push [feelings] down and pour booze on top of it.”

“He’s a special person,” Mr. Zofchak said of Father Keenan. “It started on that day in September of 2001, but it has never ended—and it never will.”

Finding God in the Aftermath

A total of 343 firefighters died on Sept. 11, 2001. Since then, over 400 more have died for reasons that can be attributed to the fallout of that day. After the towers fell, fires raged underground for weeks, sending plumes of toxic smoke laced with over 30 known carcinogens into the air. “We eventually got proper masks,” Father Keenan said, recounting his time in the pit at Ground Zero, “but we’d drop the masks” while digging or talking because they were uncomfortable. 

Now 85 years of age, Father Keenan has dealt with 14 different conditions traced to his time in the pit, including cancers, post traumatic stress disorder and a sleep disorder. At the time of our interview, he was undergoing treatment for a recently diagnosed cancer in both of his kidneys.

Still, Father Keenan approaches life with a good sense of humor. “Look at me, don’t I look great?” he said. He said his doctors are currently monitoring seven conditions. Father Keenan believes he will eventually succumb to them, but even with that in mind, his outlook remains bright. When that day comes, he says, he will just “kiss my butt goodbye and I’ll say, ‘Jesus, I’m on my way.’”

Father Keenan has not gone through his medical issues alone. “Every guy who was there is just kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Mr. Zofchak, who was among the firefighters at Ground Zero, said. “We don’t talk about if we’re going to get sick. We talk about when.” Having a chaplain who is navigating the same dread helps him feel “like it’s going to be OK.”

“Listen, it’s probably going to be bad, but in the end, it’s going to be OK because you have your faith. Chris is gonna walk with you. Jesus will walk with you. It’s gonna be all right in the end.”

Mr. Daly said that the firefighters, a significant portion of whom are Catholic, have a special connection to their chaplain—and to God. “They’re a bunch of seemingly ordinary guys sitting around the firehouse,” he continued, “and then an alarm comes in…and all of a sudden, a kind of grace descends on them at that moment. They have no idea what awaits them, but they’re completely willing to risk their lives for people they don’t even know.”

“Just as the devil is to be found in evil, God is to be found in good,” he said, crediting the idea to Judge. “By that theology, they just have more God in them.”

25 Years Later

Most of the firefighters in the F.D.N.Y. today were not on the job in 2001. “The young guys look at us with respect, but they can’t really understand what happened,” Mr. Zofchak said, reflecting on the quarter-century that has passed since the terrorist attacks. Though Father Keenan is retired from his official role as chaplain, the guys at Ladder 24 are still happy to see him when he shows up. 

On a June afternoon, as he gave a tour of the firehouse’s memorabilia from Sept. 11, and mementos of the Franciscan chaplains that came before him, younger firefighters listened intently to the gregarious man in a religious habit that, one firefighter’s daughter had decided, made him look like a Jedi. In retirement, as on the job, Father Keenan still has a knack for making people feel like they have known him for a lifetime after just a few minutes. 

Those firefighters, like many today, might not remember what Father Keenan described as the “incredible unity” that briefly followed the terrorist attacks. But he believes that the country and the church need to find their way back to it, and it is not too late. “Us coming together as one is not an impossible dream,” he said. “Not only was it possible, it was real.”

Mr. Daly believes that Father Judge would be proud of what his successor made of the role. “Mychal would recognize Chris as the person we all should be,” he said. If Judge was “Joe DiMaggio,” then Father Keenan is “Mickey Mantle…. They’re both champions. They’re both people you want to admire and want to emulate and want to thank God for.”

This article appears in September 2026.