The Rev.
Daniel Egan was a native New Yorker, son of a police lieutenant, Thomas
J. Egan and Mary Beirne. He died February 10, 2000 at Hudson Valley Centre
Hospital, Peekskill, N.Y. He
had retired to Graymoor Friary, Garrison, N.Y. and was 84 years of age.
His tireless
work in rehabilitating drug addicts brought him the nickname
“the Junkie Priest.”
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.
“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 in the city of New York. 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 crises 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 centre for drug addicts a decade
ago in Calcutta, at Mother Teresa’s request. In an interview last year
[1999], “She was like all saints—very stubborn.”
Cardinal
John O’Connor praised Father Egan in his homily at a Mass attended by
Father Egan in September 1999. At that 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 a “the Junkie Priest,” it was
“with great affection and 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 terrible 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.”
Seeing
Dignity in Addicts, and Offering Them Hope.
In the
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 in Graymoor for teenage girls who were addicted
to drugs. Over the years, he also worked as program director at St. Joseph’s
Rehabilitation Centre at Saranac Lake, N. Y., and in programs elsewhere.
He received
various honors including awards for pioneering anti-drug programs in the
armed forces.
Father Egan went to schools in the Bronx, entered the Friars of 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, D. C.
His surviving
family members were John, Philip and Gerard; and a sister Veronica Egan.
 Email
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