If there was a silver lining to the tragic death of Denis Mullaney, the commanding officer of the 107th precinct in Queens who killed himself this week, it was the call to action made by the priest who officiated his funeral — where he implored the NYPD to do more to “break the silence” around suicides within their ranks.

Father Joseph Fonti, 54, told the mourners at the packed St. Mel’s Catholic Church in Flushing Friday that he was all too familiar with suicide, both within his own family and among his friends, some of whom are cops.

“People are fragile, they break,” Fonti told the crowd of roughly 250, including row after row of somber police officers. “If you suffer from cancer people run to you and they do anything for you. If you tell them you suffer from mental illness or anxiety they try but they get scared or they get uncomfortable.”

“We need to address it in our own families and in the church and in the Police Department. The police in particular have been so tight-lipped about this issue,” he urged.

Mullaney, 44, a 20-year police veteran, shot himself in his parked squad car Monday on Underhill Avenue near the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway. He was the NYPD’s first suicide of 2021.

Typically four to five NYPD officers commit suicide every year. But when 10 officers killed themselves in 2019, the department under then-Commissioner James O’Neill instituted changes, such as allowing officers in crisis to keep their badges even while handing in their firearms to de-stigmatize asking for help. There were four NYPD suicides in 2020.

“The time for silence is over,” Fonti said.

Mullaney, who was made commander of the 107th precinct in Queens last fall, called one of his superiors as well as family members to warn them he was feeling suicidal and reportedly apologized in advance, police sources have told The Post.

‘”He knew he could call in a 10-13 – the code for an officer needing help,” his uncle Eddie Mullaney, 80, a retired NYPD policeman, said at the funeral. His fellow officers as well as members of the large Mullaney family, which includes several generations of police officers, would “have come running.”

“We would have called in our own 10-13,” the elder Mullaney said. “We had Denis’ back. He knew that.”

Instead Mullaney, who was going through a divorce from his wife, Amanda, a fellow police officer, and who had recently moved back into his childhood home with his widowed mother, “made a different choice,” his uncle told the congregation.

The normally upbeat Mullaney, who leaves behind a young son, Denis Patrick III, had reduced crime during his seven months at the precinct, but had been “hurting” for the past five or six weeks — and his despondency seemed to come on “quick,” his uncle said.

Father Fonti said he understood that kind of depression.

He told mourners that there had been suicides in his family going back four generations. His Sicilian-born great-grandfather, Liborio Fonti, killed himself in 1918 and because of that was not permitted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. His friend, Brooklyn priest Timothy Hirten committed suicide in Aug. 2020 by walking in front of a train.

The temptation is to remember Mullaney only for how he ended his life, not as the proud scion of a family where both his grandfathers and two uncles were also police officers who celebrated his climb up the NYPD ladder, Fonti said.

Chief Ruben Beltran of Queens South also urged loved ones friends and colleagues to look beyond Mullaney’s last act.

“Unfortunately, the disease that took Denis from us has been and continues to be a persistent assailant attacking the fraternity of our profession,” Beltran said during the service. “We will not let how Denis died obscure the light and the love that Denis carried within him and which he generously shared.”

Police funerals for officers who have died by their own hand have often been awkward affairs in the past, several current and retired cops said. The service for Mullaney, held at the same church where he had been baptized, was an altar boy and attended school, signaled a new bluntness and empathy for cops who take their own lives, they said.

The priest’s candor moved one female officer from Mullaney’s precinct to thank him after the service for being so open about a subject she said cops don’t like to talk about, he said.

“I was talking to the Mullaney family but I was also talking to the police officers who were there,” Fonti told The Post after the service.

He continued: “There was probably at least one officer listening who may be feeling the way Denis did and I hope I reached him or her. Cops are under so much pressure these days.”