Should he be Saint Mychal? (News).

When Kelly Lynch was growing up in East Rutherford, New Jersey, she used to ear her father say of their parish priest, "Someday this man will become a saint--keep your eyes on him." He was speaking of Father Mychal Judge, O.F.M., the fire department chaplain who died in a hail of steel and concrete as he accompained firefighters to the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He was the first officially recorded fatality of the terrorist attacks.

"It wouldn't surprise me in the least if that happened," says Lynch, a mother of four who now helps to run Mychal's Message, a new organization that ministers to the homeless people Judge used to work with in New York City.

Over the past 18 months, the story of Judge's life and death has set off a flurry of interest in making him a saint. He has big fans particularly among the disparate populations he worked with closely: firefighters, recovering addicts, AIDS patients, and homeless people. Gay activists have also rallied around the Franciscan friar, reportedly a celibate homosexual, fueling controversy about the widely-proclaimed hero.

Los Angeles-based TV producer Burt Kearns started www.saintmychal.com last May as an information clearinghouse on Judge. He hopes to collect material for a documentary and has received hundreds of e-mails from around the world, including four that Kearns says document miracles. Others have asked for pieces of Judge's clothing as relics. "Why not begin the investigation while the people's memories are fresh?" he asks.

The long process toward canonization typically starts at least five years after the person's death, although exceptions are made, as in the case of Mother Teresa. Nonetheless, says Michael Ford, author of Father Mychal Judge: An Authentic American Hero (Paulist Press), "the Roman Catholic Church needs a contemporary saint right now, and, having carefully interviewed more than 50 of his friends, I would have no hesitation in adding my endorsement."

Still, Judge's religious order is not jumping on the bandwagon. Provincial minister Father John Felice, O.F.M. said that he believed the rush toward canonization was "a mistake." "He was a very human, flawed, complex person just like the rest of us," Felice said. "His real legacy to each one of us is that such is the stuff of greatness."

"He was an ordinary man doing extraordinary things," Lynch agrees. "But his example shows how all of us as Catholics and Christians are called to be saintlike."