John E. Delendick — requiem.nw

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Died of it afterward on November 23, 2023, aged 74.

Their life

Rev. Monsignor John Edward Delendick was a Catholic chaplain with the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) who comforted firefighters and their families at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks. Msgr. Delendick was ordained as a priest in 1977 and served at several churches before joining the FDNY in 1996. On Sundays, when Monsignor John would lead Mass, he always made it a point to connect with children using his incredibly witty sense of humor. He told interesting stories that helped his congregation understand the message he was trying to convey. His work became especially important after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He was on site at Ground Zero, blessing the bodies of those who were killed in the attack. He worked directly with firefighters who were grieving the loss of colleagues or otherwise struggling in the aftermath of the attacks, and he traveled to Ground Zero with the families of missing or fallen firefighters, comforting them as they viewed the site where their loved ones were lost. Monsignor John was a man of absolute wisdom and integrity. He was always quick with a joke and a kind word and had a way of making everyone feel special. In 2003, Msgr. Delendick was named Chaplain to his Holiness by Pope John Paul II (1920–2005). This honor came with the new title of Reverend Monsignor. In recent years, following his diagnosis, he had stepped back from regular duties while he battled his illness but continued to serve as a fill-in chaplain. His illness was linked to his exposure to toxins at Ground Zero. Just a few months before his death, he attended an annual memorial to those from the FDNY who died

of 9/11-related illnesses that year. In an interview for the Daily News, he shared this personal memory of

9/11: We were running along, and a cop is running next to me. He says, “Father, can I go to confession?” I looked and said, “This is an act of war, isn’t it?” He said, “Yeah, I believe so.” I said, “Then I’m giving general absolution.” I gave everyone general absolution, and I kept running. On Thanksgiving morning, Monsignor John Edward Delendick succumbed to his battle with pancreatic cancer at the age of 74. It seems fitting that he perished on a day devoted to gratitude.

How they died

Chaplain Rev. Monsignor of the Fire Department of the City of New York, who died of an illness from the rescue and recovery at the World Trade Center. The department added the name to its World Trade Center Memorial Wall at the ceremony of 04 September 2024. He died on 23 November 2023, aged 74.

The Years After

September 11, 2001

For eight months after the towers came down, men and women worked the site. Firefighters, police, paramedics, iron workers, truck drivers, cleaners, volunteers. They breathed what was in that air, and many of them have died of it since - cancers, lung disease, illnesses that took ten years or twenty to arrive.

More people have now died of September 11th than were killed on September 11th. They are not a footnote to the day. They are the day, arriving late.

A man who walked down eighty flights and out into the street, and who died of a cancer in 2031, was killed by the same attack as the man who never got out. This gate holds them together, because the same morning took them both.

Everyone taken by The Years After →

September 11, 2001

On a clear Tuesday morning, four airliners were taken. Two were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one into the western face of the Pentagon, and one came down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the passengers and crew went forward at the cockpit door.

Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven people were killed. Three hundred and forty-three were firefighters of the New York City Fire Department. Seventy-one were law enforcement officers. Eight were paramedics and emergency medical technicians. One hundred and twenty-five died at the Pentagon, military and civilian together. The rest - some two thousand four hundred of them - had gone to work, or boarded a plane, and belonged to no service at all.

None of them began that morning as heroes. A great many of them ended it as heroes: men and women who carried strangers down stairwells, who stayed with people who could not walk, who held a door, who went back up. Four men on a flight over Pennsylvania, who had thirty minutes of telephone calls and knew what had already happened, decided where their aircraft would come down.

At Arlington, the nation set aside its own rules of eligibility and buried the Pentagon's civilian dead in national ground. It had decided that on this day the distinction did not apply.

Everyone taken by September 11, 2001 →

Media

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FDNY World Trade Center Memorial Wall

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Everyone taken by The Years After →