The New York Times, May 17, 2008, Saturday

The New York Times

May 17, 2008, Saturday

The New York Times

Tending to a Flock in Hard Hats

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

The Rev. Brian Jordan had just loped to the end of a long run on a Saturday afternoon, savoring one of those rare times a priest could be considered off duty, when he checked the message on his cellphone. The voice belonged to an old contact in Local 14 of the operating engineers’ union. His words were succinct and specific: “There’s been an accident at 51st and Second. Can you help us?”

Within minutes, Father Jordan covered his running gear with the brown habit and capuche he wore as a Franciscan and drove from the Rockaway beachfront back to Midtown Manhattan. The scene he found there on March 15 was a chaos of rubble, crushed cars, rescue crews, ambulances, gawkers and, at the center, a collapsed building and a buckled construction crane.

Father Jordan looked past all of it, searching for the men in hard hats — his parish, his flock. Some were crying, some were hugging, some were kicking at the ground. A couple recognized the priest from the months they had spent at ground zero in Lower Manhattan.

On this day, as on those days, Father Jordan picked his way into the ruins. Four construction workers were known to be dead, and the bodies of two more workers would be found days later (along with the body of a woman who had been visiting from South Florida). Their surviving comrades lifted off their hard hats as the priest sprinkled holy water amid the wreckage and prayed that God would grant the souls of the departed eternal rest.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, Father Jordan has ministered to the building trades, which has meant both celebrating acts of material creation and mourning those killed in this dangerous work. The six workers’ deaths on March 15 were the most he had dealt with on a single day since Sept. 11, and came amid an especially tragic 12 months, with 26 fatalities on New York work sites.

On April 28, Father Jordan officiated at a Mass for Workers’ Memorial Day in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In most years, safer years, the annual event had been easily accommodated in the priest’s home church, St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street. Regardless of the setting, Father Jordan has preached a consistent message.

“Union construction workers have sacred instruments,” he said in his homily at St. Patrick’s. “No, not just their tools, machinery and computerized systems that they are trained and responsible for. These sacred instruments are their hands.”

“As a surgeon has sacred hands while performing a medical operation, as a priest has sacred hands while celebrating the Eucharist, so are union construction workers with their sacred and skillful hands” doing godly work by building hospitals, schools, family homes. “I am not stretching the imagery of sacredness,” he continued. “I am simply stating a fact.”

Father Jordan, 52, grew up in the Cypress Hills section of Brooklyn, the son of a bakery-truck driver who was the shop steward in his Teamsters’ local. “My father used the term ‘solidarity’ when I was a kid,” Father Jordan recalled in an interview. “He’d say, ‘When we go to church, we pray together. When we do a job, we work together. When we stand up for something, we stand together.’ So I had that concept from a young age.”

Still, Father Jordan entered Siena College near Albany with the goal of becoming a lawyer. It was the Rev. Mychal F. Judge, then an assistant to the college president, who recruited the undergraduate with this sales pitch: “Don’t be an unhappy lawyer. Be a happy priest.”

During seminary, through ordination in 1983 and in his initial parishes in the Bronx, Boston and suburban Washington, Father Jordan counted Father Judge as his mentor. In particular, he learned from the example Father Judge set in his role as chaplain to the New York City Fire Department.

So it was almost eerily appropriate that on the day Father Judge died at ground zero while tending to the fallen, Father Jordan arrived there with his holy water, beginning 10 months of praying for the dead and the living alike.

“Caring for people, making time for people, not worrying about your own needs,” Father Jordan said of his mentor’s example. “He always said, ‘Time is a gift from God. What you receive as a gift, give as a gift.’ He said that to me 30 years ago. Still makes sense.”

In acting on Father Judge’s advice, Father Jordan has worked extensively among immigrants as well as construction workers. Increasingly, he has seen the lines blur between his two specialties as immigrants have moved into the building trades. Father Jordan’s role requires a series of balancing acts: being on good terms with labor unions as well as contractors, visiting union workers as well as nonunion worksites, empathizing with illegal immigrants while hearing out rank-and-file members convinced that those same immigrants are driving down wages. On one point, though, Father Jordan has been repeatedly, publicly assertive: he believes that nonunion contractors do not provide the high level of training that construction unions do and that, as a result, nonunion workers face a greater risk of injury or death.

Day to day, though, Father Jordan builds his ties with an unforced blue-collar touch and an unreconstructed Brooklyn accent. The other morning, he went to the Lower Manhattan headquarters of Local 608 of the carpenters’ union to celebrate Mass for the instructors in its apprenticeship program.

“Hey, pal,” he said to one familiar face after another, literally and liberally back-slapping. “All the good guys are here.”

For anyone needing confession, he said, he could recommend “a church where the priests don’t speak English and have hearing problems.”

The next stop for Father Jordan was opposite the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center, where Local 147, better known as the sandhogs’ union, was blasting away on the extension of the Number 7 subway. Charlie Cannon, the local’s recording secretary, had known the priest since ground zero.

“If he could walk through that battle zone and help us there, that’s where you get the respect,” Mr. Cannon said. “If somebody cares about you that much, they’re part of the family.”

E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com