A certain Roman Catholic chaplain…lies in a soldier’s grave in that sinister plain beyond Ypres. He went forward and back over the battle field with bullets whining about him, seeking out the dying and kneeling in the mud beside them to give them Absolution, walking with death with a smile on his face, watched by his men with reverence and a kind of awe until a shell burst near him and he was killed. His familiar figure was seen and welcomed by hundreds of Irishmen who lay in that bloody place. Each time he came back across the field he was begged to remain in comparative safety. Smilingly he shook his head and went again into the storm. He had been with his boys at Ginchy and through other times of stress, and he would not desert them in their agony. They remember him as a saint. they speak his name with tears.

COMMENT: The above quote does not come from Fr Doyle today, but from Percival Phillips, a war correspondent who published the above tribute to Fr Doyle in the Daily Express on 22 August 1917, less than a week after Fr Doyle’s death. 

Today is Memorial Day in the United States and I have chosen the above quote, which refers to Fr Doyle’s war exploits, specifically for any American visitors today – many of the readers of this site are based in the US. Fr Doyle, while obviously not American, is one in a long line of saintly military chaplains who laid down his life in service of others, and he is very much in the mode of Fr Vincent Capodanno and Fr Emil Kapaun who will probably be well known to American visitors. The short YouTube video below gives some small insight into the life and spirit of Fr Doyle.