John Stillman Duryea (January 19, 1918 in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

– July 22, 2006 in

Oaxaca Oaxaca ( , also , , from nci, Huāxyacac ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca), is one of the 32 states that compose the political divisions of Mexico, Federative Entities of Mexico. It is ...

Mexico Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...

), was a former

priest A priest is a religious leader authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particu ...

in the

Roman Catholic Church The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

and an author of ''Alive into the Wilderness: An Autobiography''.

Biography

Trained at St. Patrick's Seminary in

Menlo Park, California Menlo Park is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County within the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; ...

. He was ordained March 20, 1943 at St Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco by Archbishop John J. Mitty. He was an assigned in 1943 as assistant pastor at St. Matthew in San Mateo. Sent to Sacred Heart Church in Oakland from 1946 to 1950. Then assigned in 1950, as Catholic chaplain, first at

San José State University San José State University (San Jose State or SJSU) is a public university in San Jose, California. Established in 1857, SJSU is the oldest public university on the West Coast and the founding campus of the California State University (CSU) sys ...

and in 1961,

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, where he became immensely popular and influential as the pastor of St. Ann's Chapel,

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was estab ...

. According to the ''

Palo Alto Weekly The ''Palo Alto Weekly'' is a weekly community newspaper in Palo Alto in the U.S. state of California. Owned by Embarcadero Media, it serves Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Portola Valley, Stanford, East Palo Alto and Los Altos Hills. It was e ...

'' (July 25, 2006), he "became nationally famous, or infamous, for announcing on January 18, 1976, in his sermon at St. Ann's Chapel in Palo Alto that he had 'done the one thing the (Catholic Church) institution will not tolerate. I have fallen in love.'" That spring, he married artist Eve De Bona and became stepfather to her two daughters, Leslie and

Ariel Gore Ariel Gore (born June 25, 1970) is a journalist, memoirist, novelist, nonfiction author, and teacher. Gore has authored more than ten books. Gore's fiction and nonfiction work also explores creativity, spirituality, queer culture, and positive psy ...

. On the same day, he received a letter from the Archbishop of San Francisco, Joseph T. McGucken, informing him that he had been

excommunicated Excommunication is an institutional act of religious censure used to end or at least regulate the communion of a member of a congregation with other members of the religious institution who are in normal communion with each other. The purpose ...

Pope Paul VI Pope Paul VI ( la, Paulus VI; it, Paolo VI; born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini, ; 26 September 18976 August 1978) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City, Vatican City State from 21 June 1963 to his ...

. Following his dismissal from St. Ann's and excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, Duryea founded the Angelo Roncalli Community, named for

Pope John XXIII Pope John XXIII ( la, Ioannes XXIII; it, Giovanni XXIII; born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, ; 25 November 18813 June 1963) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 28 October 1958 until his death in June 19 ...

. He continued celebrating

mass Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different elementar ...

with that community on Sundays, for over twenty years, using University Lutheran Church in Palo Alto as its meeting place. His autobiography, ''Alive into the Wilderness: An Autobiography'', was published in 1985. John Duryea retired to Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2001. He died "a self-directed death" at the age of 88 on July 22, 2006 in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Family

His brother, Robert F. Duryea (1915–1988), also a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, was excommunicated and

laicized In the canon law of the Catholic Church, the loss of clerical state (commonly referred to as laicization, dismissal, defrocking, and degradation) is the removal of a bishop, priest, or deacon from the status of being a member of the clergy. The t ...

after having disclosed a seven-year marriage and five-year-old child.

Qualities

In addition to normal priestly duties and being well loved by his local community, Duryea practiced a unique "ministry of the wilderness". He led numerous hiking and backpacking trips open to all, regardless of church affiliation or outdoor experience. His welcoming attitude and accepting nature encouraged many people to experience first hand the spiritual power of nature. Duryea was an amateur photographer of above-average talent whose subject was the wilderness he loved and the people who visited it with him. He used an old-fashioned large, heavy

Rolleiflex Rolleiflex is the name of a long-running and diverse line of high-end cameras originally made by the German company Franke & Heidecke, and later Rollei, Rollei-Werke. History The "Rolleiflex" name is most commonly used to refer to Rollei's pr ...

twin-lens reflex camera A twin-lens reflex camera (TLR) is a type of camera with two objective lenses of the same focal length. One of the lenses is the photographic objective or "taking lens" (the lens that takes the picture), while the other is used for the viewfinde ...

that produced

medium format Medium format has traditionally referred to a film format in photography and the related cameras and equipment that use film. Nowadays, the term applies to film and digital cameras that record images on media larger than the used in 35&nbs ...

square slides. His friends have selected a few hundred of the best of his thousands of slides, scanned them, and made the images available on the web.

References

External links

John Duryea's websiteJohn Duryea's images
{{DEFAULTSORT:Duryea, John People excommunicated by the Catholic Church 2006 suicides 2006 deaths 1918 births 20th-century American Roman Catholic priests People from Palo Alto, California Suicides in Mexico