TOLEDO (OH)
Toledo Blade [Toledo OH]
November 13, 2024
By The Blade Editorial Board
Our heroes sometimes turn out to have clay feet — or worse.
Such is the case for the late Msgr. Michael Doyle, whose name once graced the Catholic Diocese’s Pastoral Center in downtown Toledo.
Monsignor Doyle was seen as a great man in his day.
Secretly, though, he is credibly accused of having sexually abused minors. We could say it with more certainty if his supervisors back in the 1950s had acted responsibly instead of covering for him.
The Toledo diocese has been in possession of accusations against Monsignor Doyle for decades, and even settled a case with one of his accusers 22 years ago.
Only now does the diocese say there has been a “credible allegation.”
With this latest determination, Monsignor Doyle’s name, on a sign dedicating the diocese’s Pastoral Center downtown, has been stripped from the wall.
Announced on Sunday a week ago, the alleged abuse took place more than 65 years ago. Monsignor Doyle died in 1987.
Said Claudia Vercellotti, a local leader in the campaign to force the church to confront the cancer of priestly pedophilia, it’s “unconscionable.”
She’s right.
In his day he was a titan of the church — a noted Toledo political figure, labor mediator, and social service advocate. He pastored churches in Fremont and Mansfield almost a century ago.
In Toledo, he was assistant director of Catholic Charities from 1932 to 1946, and was chaplain of Saint Anthony Villa, a former orphanage in Toledo, from 1935 until his retirement in 1977.
It was at Saint Anthony Villa that he was accused of sexual assault of a child, whose bravery in reporting the assault got her kicked out of the orphanage.
How many other accusations remain in dusty file folders waiting for a future ruling that an accusation is “credible”?
As slow and resistant as the church has been, the acknowledgments are welcome and help victims and victims’ families find peace.
Since then, every institution that deals with children, including the Catholic Church, has become sensitive to the potential for child abuse and has implemented procedures to protect children and to protect against false accusations as well.
Those new protocols came at a high price of shame and destroyed trust that could have been avoided if responsible church leaders had acted appropriately from the start.