'Right priest, right time'

By Christine Bordelon
Clarion Herald

DAVID MICHAEL DOYLE
➤ Age: 31
➤ Home parish: Our Lady of the Rosary, New Orleans
➤Diaconate internship: St. Clement of Rome, Metairie

A phone call from a friend about a job in a new evangelization ministry in the Archdiocese of New Orleans became a catalyst for transitional deacon candidate David Doyle to consider the priesthood.

Not that he or people around him didn’t think he would become a priest one day. Doyle was a long-time altar server at St. John the Evangelist Parish in his hometown of White Plains, New York.

He especially remembered several priest role models, such as his parochial vicar, Father Tim Wiggins, who buried his parents and grandparents, and his pastor, Msgr. Neil Graham, whom he befriended until he died in 2018.

“He was joyful, happy, always present to the parish and parishioners and a good example of the church,” Doyle said about Msgr. Graham.

During high school, Doyle volunteered at St. John and saw the inner workings of the church, working as a sacristan and night receptionist.

He graduated in 2012 from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., with a bachelor of arts degree in history, although he began his studies as a teacher and was an Americorps Jump Start Corps member helping at-risk preschool children.

During college, he continued church work as a receptionist at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

He initially discerned the priesthood, enrolling at St. Joseph Seminary on the Immaculate Conception campus. After a year, he discovered it wasn’t “the right time or place,” and he returned to work at his hometown parish.

By the time friend Betty-Ann Hickey called about a job in the Office of Evangelization in New Orleans, Doyle was ready for a change. (Her husband, Deacon Dennis Hickey, will vest him at the diaconate ordination May 21 at St. Louis Cathedral.)

Doyle said he wasn’t necessarily contemplating the priesthood but deduced he would be working for the church, with office director Dominican Father David Caron, in a grassroots effort to spread the Gospel by “getting parishes and other organizations aware of the need for evangelization.”

Doyle also enrolled in the Institute for Lay Ecclesial Ministry at Notre Dame Seminary and earned a master’s in pastoral leadership in 2019. He will earn a master of divinity in May 2023, his ordination year as a priest.

Both experiences were training grounds for his eventual vocation to “lead the people to God and God to the people,” as a priest, he said.

“I really did think that what I was doing (in the Evangelization Office) was living out my vocation, and I was planning on doing that the rest of my life,” he said.

That all changed when a New Orleans priest said something that rattled his vocation narrative and brought the priesthood to the forefront.

“It was the right priest at the right time saying the right thing, and here I am,” he said.

In his time at Notre Dame Seminary, Doyle said he has certainly gained public-speaking confidence and strengthened his church knowledge by seeing it through the eyes of a religious.

“I’m realizing that for someone who is ordained, it takes on a different meaning – why do we do the things we do (in the Catholic faith)?” he said. “It’s taking what I know and putting it into ministry. What I know is so little, and there is a whole lot more for me to learn.”

For his diaconate experience at St. Clement of Rome in Metairie, he is “probably most excited to preach and celebrate baptisms: Preaching, to have the ability at Mass to lead people to realize that they are now sent to spread the words of the Gospel; and baptisms, to bring children into the church – that joy of welcoming a new Christian.”

Doyle wants to embrace people in a parish where they are and determine where he is most needed. He hopes to positively influence someone else who might be discerning the priesthood.

“I am here because of all of the priests in my life from New York, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans,” he said, “knowing that I could lead someone in their vocation, whatever that might be.”

[email protected]