The Venerable Tom Winslow and Remembering 9/11

“For me one of the heroes is the Venerable Tom Winslow, police officer, police chief, recovery minister, archdeacon, priest, mentor, and friend to many seminarians, as well as archivist at Nashotah House, Chaplain to the Bishop of Milwaukee, loving father and husband, and Midwest chaplain to the FBI,” said the Rev. William Patrick Edwards (‘11), Rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Southampton, New York,  “It was this latter role that took him to Ground Zero of the Twin Towers where his lungs were wrecked by exposure to the ruins of the buildings.” 

Despite a lung transplant, Fr. Winslow died ten years after climbing over the rubble to minister to the dead and to the agents, police, and firefighters who served during the days immediately afterwards. Pyx, stole, and holy oil strapped to his belt, he anointed and gave the sacrament to all. He brought Christ there, both in the Blessed Sacrament, but especially in his self-giving, selfless love.

Fr. Winslow referred to his work at Ground Zero as a "ministry of presence." A chaplain for the Milwaukee FBI office, he spent a week serving in Lower Manhattan in November 2001, at St. Paul's Chapel, a short walk from the World Trade Center site. Fr. Winslow presided over daily Mass and talked to law enforcement officers who were dealing with the unimaginable.

At the time, Fr. Winslow said that simply wearing the clerical collar that identified them as priests, he and others were able to comfort people who perhaps were reluctant to ask for help but were calmed by the presence of clergy.

One day, he took an FBI agent to a makeshift memorial that featured a large photo of John P. O'Neill, head of security for the World Trade Center. The agent knew O'Neill, who died in the attack.

"All I did right then was stand there and hold her as she cried," he said.

The bond among those working at Ground Zero was instant, and when his time there ended, Fr. Winslow was reluctant to leave.

He had no idea that he likely was taking tiny pieces of ground zero home with him. He returned to Milwaukee as bishop's chaplain to continue work as an unpaid chaplain in the Milwaukee office of the FBI, a position he had held since 1993.

Fr. Winslow had volunteered to go to New York to help debrief FBI agents. Upon arrival at Ground Zero, he was issued a respirator, but, like most everyone else, he used it only when he descended into the pit as crews continued to cart away debris to clear the site. While Fr. Winslow was there, World Trade Center buildings 5 and 6 were knocked down, sending more grit and debris into the atmosphere. Within a week of returning to Wisconsin, Fr. Winslow went to an emergency room suffering from an asthma-like attack. He had never suffered respiratory problems and was in good health.

Following the initial respiratory attack, he experienced frequent sinus and respiratory infections, pneumonia, and gastric reflux. By December 2005, a CT scan showed what looked like minute bits of glass in his lungs, and in April 2006, he was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis.

He began to use oxygen when exercising and when he traveled. When Fr. Winslow became a transplant patient at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, he was on supplemental oxygen 24 hours a day and, according to his surgeon, had weeks or, at most, a few months to live.

Tethered to 27 feet of tubing connected to his oxygen machine, Fr. Winslow continued to participate in church services. He was at a service at All Saints' Cathedral  when he got the call that a lung was available.

The next day, he underwent a single lung transplant. Lungs from a 15-year-old donor became available and on November 30, 2009; one was transplanted into Fr. Winslow, with a second going to another patient.

The cause of Winslow's pulmonary fibrosis will never be known. "We think it's related to 9-11 because he was exposed to pollutants and toxins there but it's impossible to prove," said Nilto C. De Oliveira, surgical director of the University of Wisconsin lung transplant program.

Even through all of this, nothing stopped him from performing his priest role at All Saints' Cathedral and for the FBI.

Inside St. Paul's Chapel, meals were served and workers could pick up clothing, toiletries, and other donated items to replace what they quickly used up and wore out. Law enforcement officers and workers got 20-minute breaks,and it was common to see people moving in and out of the chapel during the Holy Eucharist Service held at noon each day. Parishioners sitting in the pews at the start of the 45-minute service were replaced by others by the end.

In reflecting upon the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, Fr. Winslow said, "One of my most enduring images - it was not all doom and gloom; it was a very rewarding experience - I was presiding over the noon Eucharist. I looked in the back and here's a New York cop with a sandwich in one hand and a hymnal in the other.”

One day a woman approached with a bouquet of flowers. They were yellow and white, probably chrysanthemums. The woman had seen Fr. Winslow's FBI jacket and hard hat and knew he was a chaplain. She gave the bouquet to Fr. Winslow and another chaplain.

"She said, 'My husband died in there, could you please drop them in?'” Fr. Winslow and the other chaplain readily agreed. They said a prayer for the woman's husband, one of the thousands who died in the fire and dust of Sept. 11.

Then they dropped the yellow and white flowers into the hole where a gleaming skyscraper had once stood.

Portions of the preceding article were written originally by Meg Jones, reporter for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 29, 2011. Meg is a general assignment reporter who specializes in military and veterans issues. The Ven. Thomas Frank Winslow, chaplain to the Bishop of Milwaukee since 2006, died August 23, 2012, at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison. He was 68. Archdeacon Winslow was a division chaplain for the FBI’s Milwaukee office and worked at Ground Zero in New York for a week after the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. Born in 1944, he was a graduate of Cardinal Stritch University and of Nashotah House. He was ordained deacon in 1983 and priest in 2006, and served all of his vocation in the Diocese of Milwaukee. He was deacon at St. Philip’s Church, Waukesha, 1983-85; St. David of Wales Church, New Berlin, 1983-95; and St. Alban’s Church, Sussex, 1996-2002. He served as archdeacon of the diocese from 2001 to 2006.