September 11 and the clamour to canonise Victim Number 00001

The first thing to know about the clamour for the canonisation of Father Mychal Judge, officially recorded by New York City as Victim No 00001 of the World Trade Centre tragedy, is that he would have considered it ridiculous. Still, he would surely have smiled, because the man in the brown robe never minded the limelight.

Father Mychal, who died in the lobby of the North Tower when debris sent flying by the collapse of the neighbouring South Tower struck him on the back of the head, was a more complicated man than his legend after death suggests. It not surprising the campaign to have made into a saint is more controversial than simple.

One tiny clue to the cross-currents of his personality comes from this anecdote about those first minutes when word came of the tragedy at ground zero. Father Mychal, chaplain to the New York fire department, joined men from the station just across from his midtown friary to rush to the scene. Once at the North Tower, he paused before plunging in with a bottle of holy water. He needed first to comb his gray hair and mist it with hairspray.

Father Mychal, who was 68 when he died, has become the single most potent symbol of the heroism and selflessness that was demonstrated by so many New Yorkers on that day. A book has been written about him, there is talk of a television movie, and his FDNY helmet was recently received by Pope John Paul II.

But he was also a bit of an iconoclast, whose instinct to embrace all sometimes put him at odds with more literal leaders of his church.

Indeed, it is almost as if that sheer largeness of Father Mychal has overwhelmed his former Franciscan brothers, who are now taking the lead to damp the enthusiasm for his canonisation. Possibly, they are uncomfortable with the less orthodox elements of his life. Maybe there is a little jealousy too, that Father Mychal belonged to so many different constituencies in the city and not only to them.

Who are those who feel so compelled to lay claim to Father Mychal? The list is very long and might include the thousands of homeless who felt the warmth of his ministry. He was also famous for never leaving the friary without a wad of dollars to hand out to any lost soul he encountered on the street.)

Certainly, he will always have a special place in the hearts of all firefighters. And there are the gay rights activists, who will never forget how he bucked his superiors and stepped forward to care for the first Aids sufferers back in the Eighties.

Father Mychal, who took the vows of chastity at 15, may have had secrets like most of us. But his history as an alcoholic was not among them. Even 23 years after he had regained sobriety, the first-generation Irish-American (his parents arrived in Brooklyn from Co Leitrim) always gave public tribute to the body that helped him, Alcoholics Anonymous.

It explained, for instance, why his memorial service was held one month after his death in an Episcopal church rather than Catholic one. It was where he used to attend AA meetings.

About his homosexuality, he was a little more circumspect. He kept it from the men across from the friary at Engine 1, Ladder 24 on West 31st Street, but he did speak about it to the city's last fire commissioner, Thomas Van Essen. "He and I often laughed about it, because we knew how difficult it would have been for the other firefighters to accept it as easily as I had," the former commissioner said.

There is one part of the myth of Father Mychal that has been set aside. For weeks after 9/11, reports circulated that he had died while administering the last rites to a fireman outside the North Tower.

It fitted perfectly, of course. His death had come at the very moment he was engaged in an act of selflessness. But later it became clear that version of events was not quite right.

It was as the dust cleared inside the lobby of the tower that a fire officer tripped on a body on the ground and shone torch onto the face of an already lifeless Father Mychal.

The moment was captured in the eyewitness documentary film, "9/11", shot by two French brothers that was shown on British television on the first anniversary of the attack. People around the world have seen the Reuters photograph of five firemen a few minutes later bearing a chair out of the mayhem of ground zero, with their beloved chaplain sat up in it, but with his head lolling, as if he were asleep, onto his right shoulder.

The cult of Father Mychal has been growing since. A stretch of West 31st Street has been named after him. President George Bush recently signed the Mychal Judge Bill, allowing all survivors of the police, firefighters and rescue personnel who died to collect benefits, even if they're not children or a spouse.

And there is a website www.saintmychal.com, dedicated to his eventual canonisation. It was designed by Burt Kearns, a television producer, who never even knew him.

The process of making someone a saint cannot begin until at least five years after their deaths. And the variegated nature of Father Mychal's life (he once led mass in Pennsylvania station to the intense irritation of his superiors) means that winning over conservative minds in the Vatican would be a tough task.

But Mr Kearns was moved to create the website precisely because he meant so much to so many people. "From the bravest to the dispossessed, people from all walks of life claim a new hero," he says.

The hardest for some to swallow has been the speed with which he has been claimed by the gay community. Yet many gays remember how in 2000 he agreed to march in alternative gay parade in Queens on St Patrick's Day, ignoring the disapproval of his church.

Father Mychal was featured recently on the cover of the gay monthly, The Advocate. "What is life says is, 'Yes you can be gay and good, you can be homosexual and holy'," said Brendan Fay, a gay rights activist and the friend who persuaded him to join the St Patrick's Day march.

But it is up to his holy order can set the ball rolling on canonisation. And the Franciscans say that they have no intention of doing any such thing. They insist that to sanctify Father Mychal would be, somehow, to reduce his life to something much narrower than it actually was. It is as if to sanctify him would also be to dehumanise him.

"A lot of what Mychal was about was admirable," the Reverend John Felice, who was his provincial director, told The New York Times. "I'm just a little leary of putting in a context that shoves a person away from our human experience, and makes them less effective as models for everyday living. It's better to keep the real Mychal alive and well in your brain. I think he has a lot more to say than a Mychal with a halo over his head."