Incidentally, I also read a copy of Junkie Priest a few years back and was struck by how much of the Monsignor oral lore (as opposed to current PR) attributed to O'Brian by Daytop seemed to be strikingly similar (concocted to co-opt?) to the Junkie Priest (Rev. Daniel Egan) story.
Part of that was just the lingo of the era, which seems to have been especially pronounced in distinguishing itself from previous generations, but that may well just be my perspective...
My take on the versions vs. reality didn't have anything to do with parlance.
Father Egan's obituary in the
New York Times:
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Daniel Egan, 84, Drug Fighter Known as 'Junkie Priest,' DiesBy ERIC PACE
Published: February 13, 2000The Rev. Daniel Egan, whose tireless work in rehabilitating drug addicts brought him the nickname ''the Junkie Priest,'' died on Thursday at a hospital in Peekskill, N.Y. He was 84 and lived at the Graymoor Friary in Garrison, N.Y.
Father Egan's work with addicts began in 1952, when he was preaching in a church in Manhattan and saw a troubled woman. She was addicted to narcotics and in need of help. He telephoned a number of hospitals in the city, he recalled later, but none would take her. ''She was considered a criminal,'' he said.
So Father Egan, a Franciscan Friar of the Atonement, became a certified alcohol- and drug-abuse counselor and a chaplain of Narcotics Anonymous. In 1962, he founded Village Haven, a halfway house for women who were addicted to drugs, in Greenwich Village. Before long, 8 or 10 women a week, most of them newly released from jail, were going to Village Haven for help.
''These women face a crisis the moment they are freed,'' Father Egan said in a 1963 interview. ''The simplest things become their deepest need -- a place to eat and sleep, a job, a coat to wear, a friend.''
His work took him far afield. He established a center for drug addicts a decade ago in Calcutta, at Mother Teresa's request. In an interview last year he recalled, ''She was like all saints -- very stubborn.''
Cardinal John O'Connor praised Father Egan in his homily at a Mass attended by Father Egan last September. At the time, Father Egan was serving in nursing homes for AIDS patients and continuing his work against addiction.
The cardinal said that when Father Egan was referred to as ''the Junkie Priest,'' it was ''with great affection and great admiration.''
When Father Egan was a young priest, the cardinal recalled, ''He used to roam the streets of Times Square, and that area in general, looking for ways of helping prostitutes, so many of them addicts to one form of drug or another. God knows how many lives and souls Father Egan has saved in that terribly difficult kind of work.''
A fellow Franciscan Friar of the Atonement, the Rev. Walter Gagne , said that in the 1950's, when Father Egan was beginning his work with addicts, he would go to the old Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village. Many of its inmates were addicts who had worked as prostitutes. ''He would stand on the sidewalk by the prison and start talking to the women up in the prison windows,'' said Father Gagne, and pretty soon: ''They'd be yelling at him, and he'd be yelling back at them. He was ministering to them even before they got out of prison.''
Regardless of how he carried out his ministry, Father Egan thought of the afflicted in spiritual terms. ''If we had the vision of faith,'' he once wrote, ''we would see beneath every behavior -- no matter how repulsive -- beneath every bodily appearance -- no matter how dirty or deformed -- a priceless dignity and value that makes all material facts and scientific technologies fade into insignificance.''
In a 1965 interview at St. Patrick's Villa Retreat House in Nanuet, N.Y., where he was ministering to women who had broken their heroin habit, he said the best way of dealing with drug addicts was through personal counseling.
He also suggested that government agencies fighting drug abuse ''save themselves money and trouble'' by setting up storefront offices in high-addiction neighborhoods.
''Besides the human salvation, think of the prison expenses you'd save,'' he said. ''You could pay these girls $5 a day to just sit there and talk to the junkies who wandered in for a cigarette instead of a fix.''
In 1970, he founded New Hope Manor at Graymoor for teenage girls who were addicted to drugs. Over the years, he also worked as program director at St. Joseph's Rehabilitation Center at Saranac Lake, N.Y., and in programs elsewhere.
He received various honors, including awards for pioneering anti-drug programs in the armed forces.
A native New Yorker, he was the son of a police lieutenant, Thomas J. Egan, and the former Mary Bierne. He went to schools in the Bronx, entered the Friars of the Atonement in 1935, professed his first vows in 1937 and received a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a master's degree in religious education, both from Catholic University in Washington.
He is survived by three brothers, John, Philip and Gerard; and a sister, Veronica Egan.
Photo: The Rev. Daniel Egan in 1963. (Associated Press)
A version of this obituary; biography appeared in print on February 13, 2000, on page 144 of the New York edition.© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company