Career
Trained at Saint Patrick"s Seminary in Menlo Park, California. He was ordained March 20, 1943 at Street Mary"s Cathedral in San Francisco by Archbishop John Jay Mitty. He was an assigned in 1943 as assistant pastor at Saint 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 and in 1961, Stanford University, where he became immensely popular and influential as the pastor of Saint Ann"s Chapel, Palo Alto. On the same day, he received a letter from the Archbishop of San Francisco, Joseph T. McGucken, informing him that had been excommunicated by Pope Paul VI. Each Sunday, the Angelo Roncalli Community would have its services at 9:00 a.m.
ULC would have its services at 10:00 a.m.
John Duryea retired to Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2001. His autobiography, Alive into the Wilderness, was published in 1985.
In addition to normal priestly duties, 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 twin-lens reflex camera that produced medium format 6 cm (24 in) 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.
