John Duryea

John Stillman Duryea (b. San Francisco, California, Jan. 19, 1918, d. Oaxaca, Mexico, July 22, 2006) was a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. Trained at St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, California, he served as a Catholic chaplain, first at San Jose State University and then at Stanford University, where he became immensely popular and influential as the pastor of St. Ann's Chapel, Palo Alto.

According to the Palo Alto Weekly (July 26, 2006), he "became nationally famous, or infamous, for announcing on Jan. 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 summer, he married artist Eve De Bona, and became stepfather to her two daughters, Leslie and Ariel Gore.

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. He continued celebrating mass with that community for over twenty years, using University Lutheran Church in Palo Alto as its meeting place.

He retired to Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2001.

His autobiography, "Alive into the Wilderness", was published in 1985.

In addition to normal priestly duties, John 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.

John 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 twin-lens reflex camera that produced medium format 6 cm 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 site http://www.duryea.tirfing.com/pics.

More information is available at http://arielgore.com/2006/07/letter-from-john-duryea.html and at http://www.duryea.tirfing.com.