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Friends Remember Father Doyle's Kindness

Tribune file photo (2007)

This chapel had significance to Doyle for its symbolic blending of holiness and religion with education.

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By JEFF HOUCK | The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 8, 2008

Updated: 12/09/2008 02:12 pm

TAMPA - The underdogs always had Father Joseph Doyle in their corner.

If you had trouble paying tuition at Jesuit High School, where he served as president for 12 years, he found a way to make up the difference. If you were a student who didn't quite fit in with the athletic crowd, he'd use his subtle, grandfatherly manner to help you find your niche. If your mother was sick with cancer, he was there at the bedside to pray with you. If the death of a child made you wonder how you'd make it through the next crying jag, it was the always-ready-to-hug arms of Father Doyle that soothed your broken heart.

Friends this week are remembering Doyle's compassion as well as his steady guidance as Jesuit's longest-serving president in the wake of his death Saturday at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa. He was 72.

Marilyn Wagner, who worked as his assistant for his dozen years at the school, said her friend "understood the common man very well." Born in 1936 in New York City, Doyle grew up as an only child of an Irish Catholic family in the Bronx. In his early teens, he lost his father and worked hard to overcome dyslexia.

"He had a great I.Q. but struggled with his studies," Wagner said Monday evening. "He had a great heart for people who struggle. He would seek out the least in any group. He was the guardian angel of people."

After graduating from Fordham University in 1958, he entered the Jesuits in the southern province of the Society of Jesus at Grand Coteau, La., west of New Orleans. Part of the order's training before ordination includes teaching. That brought him to teach history, English and Latin at Jesuit High in Tampa from 1964 to 1967.

"That's when he sunk his roots into Tampa," said Rev. Richard Hermes, who succeeded Doyle as the school's president. "It laid his roots for his future ministry as president. Many of the men he worked with later were men he taught as high school boys during those years."

He left to provide campus ministry in Mobile, Ala., at Spring Hill College, the third-oldest Jesuit college in the country. In 1975, Doyle returned to Grand Coteau to become director of the novitiate, where members of the Jesuit order are trained. After spending a few years ministering to a high school in Houston, he took over for eight years as pastor at St. Joseph parish in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.

A talented fundraiser

And while his political skills were honed as the parish leader, nothing quite prepared him for his appointment to Jesuit High in 1996 as president.

"It surprised a lot of people," Hermes said. "I think it surprised him as well. He hadn't spent his life in academia."Doyle's more casual approach stood in contrast to the business-like style of his predecessor, the Rev. James Bradley. After a difficult period of transition as he adjusted to the job, Doyle began to flourish as the spiritual and financial leader of the 110-year-old campus' 675 students and 55 teachers.

"He grew tremendously with the job," Wagner said. "I used to tell him that all the time."

Tapping a newfound business savvy, Doyle boosted financial contributions from alumni and parents. In 2003-04, Jesuit started a capital campaign that now averages more than $1 million a year in donations. The campaign has worked toward an $8 million goal for physical improvements such as a technology wing, classrooms, library enhancements and gymnasium renovations.

Foremost in his mind was that the new structures remind visitors that Jesuit High is a Catholic campus, from the memorial tower where a bell tolls in memory of Jesuit priests to the plaza in front of the chapel where bricks commemorate the names of alumni who have passed on. The statue of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, stands in the student commons. At Doyle's direction, the new athletic facility bears the school's motto in Latin: ad majorem Dei gloriam ("For the greater glory of God.")

"He wanted students and families to find Christ and know Christ," Hermes said.

A spiritual mission

Also a driving priority was that the private school's $11,100 annual tuition not prevent students from diverse backgrounds from attending. In 2007, for example, Jesuit awarded $612,000 in financial aid, nearly double what it had four years earlier. Maintaining that openness was one of his directives when Hermes took over.

"The most important thing he said to me was that when you think about personnel to hire, think about people who love Jesus," Hermes said. "He really saw the position as a real spiritual mission to lead the school and wanted me to take that seriously."

Doyle had planned to retire from the school at the end of June this year, but was forced from the job by a stroke in March that sent him into recuperation at a Jesuit order facility in New Orleans.

He returned to Tampa in early November to officiate a wedding and several baptisms as well as visit with friends. A week before Thanksgiving, he was admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital with flu symptoms, which led to his being placed on a ventilator due to congestive heart failure.

Doyle improved enough to be moved out of intensive care, but experienced a heart attack on Friday from which he did not recover. At the end, he was surrounded by friends who prayed the rosary at his bedside and recited the litany of saints to comfort him. Just the way he would have done for anyone else.

"He was the kindest of men," Wagner said.

Doyle is survived by two cousins; Eileen Fagan of Toms River, N.J., and Mary Walsh of Surprise, Ariz.

A visitation will be from 4 p.m. until 9 p.m. Wednesday and 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday in St. Anthony's Chapel at Jesuit High School. A wake will take place at 7 p.m. Wednesday, with a funeral mass at 7 p.m. Thursday. Bishop Robert Lynch of the Diocese of St. Petersburg will be the presiding homilist.

Burial will be Saturday at Spring Hill College in Mobile.

Reporter Jeff Houck can be reached at (813) 259-7324.

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