April 15, 1998

An April headline remembered

For those of us who watched it happen, it's hard to believe it was 27 years ago.

It was April 1971. A Pacifica man made national headlines because he'd been married for several years, and had a five year old son.

Because that man was a Catholic priest, Robert Duryea, the pastor of St. Peter's Church, the shock waves still reverberate for some of us. The son is in his early thirties now. The man we all called Father was a father and a husband. Some parishioners said afterwards perhaps that explained his sympathetic understanding of the family problems of his parishioners.

I can only continue to wish the Duryeas well. I thought him an excellent pastor, and still do.

Naive is a proper word to describe my feelings when the first rumors of the marriage came to me, from a non-Catholic friend in Fairmont. Ace newsman that I am, I laughed it off and ignored it.

As the "secret" continued to spread, I finally was convinced it wasn't just a wild rumor. The then editor of the Tribune, Pat Lynn, was able to reach Father Duryea at an agonizingly early hour on a Tuesday morning. An agreement, a difficult one from the point of view of a weekly newspaper editor, was concluded. Pat would not break the story that Wednesday, and Father Duryea would not talk to other reporters. The priest was able to handle things his way, in a more dignified and systematic manner, insofar as this is possible when your life is being turned upside down and the metropolitan press is hounding you. For those of us who knew, it was nine days of hanging by our thumbs with a major national story that was a Pacifica Tribune exclusive.

For me, it was also the hope, as sensational as the story was intrinsically, that it would be handled with sympathy and understanding for a man I liked and respected.

It was, thanks to Pat Lynn, who has gone on to careers as TV news anchor, radio station and weekly newspaper owner in Alaska. (He was responsible for much of the fine radio reporting of the Exxon Valdez disaster). The Tribune won a state award for quality reporting that year.

It was in August, 1971, four months later, on vacation in Colorado, in a small town grocery store, that I casually picked up a magazine I rarely read, Good Housekeeping, and flipped through to find a story about the priest and his family.

Full color photos, a feature article, and interviews, a full retelling of the story I knew so well by then, of the priest and the nurse and the hospital where they met. Somehow it seemed fitting I should pick up this magazine at random, 1500 miles from home, to read about a man I'd first met when he baptized a tiny cousin of mine, in a Berkeley Church, years before.

The church in the round in which he said Mass is long gone, the victim of dry rot. Though the rule could be changed by the Pope with the stroke of a pen, Catholic priests of the Latin Rite are still forbidden to marry, with a few interesting exceptions. Perhaps early in the third millennium, when a Black African is the Pope of Rome and Mother Teresa has been canonized, priests will be allowed wives and Bob Duryea will be remembered as a pioneer.

Paul Azevedo can be reached by e-mail at Paul@thereactor.net.