Group hopes to buy the late Msgr. Michael Doyle’s Camden home as a center for scholars and seekers
Msgr. Doyle was known for commitment to social justice, housing in Camden, and anti-Vietnam War activism. Supporters want a place where people can come to study Doyle's work.
Close friends of the late Msgr. Michael Doyle have launched an online fund-raising campaign to purchase the Camden rowhouse where he lived after retiring as pastor of the city’s Sacred Heart Church.
Doyle, who led successful efforts to rebuild the parish, its school, and the neighborhood, died Nov. 4 in the house on the 400 block of Jasper Street.
» READ MORE: To tears from his parishioners, a man of the cloth and for the people of Camden is retiring — at 85
On Thursday, Linda Delengowski, Barbara Dever, Susan Cedrone, and others who cared for Doyle in his final months set up a GoFundMe account with a goal of raising $100,000. The money would be used to buy and repurpose the Jasper Street property into an archive and resource for students and other visitors.
“The idea is to keep the house as a place to gather and preserve all of Michael’s writing, liturgical papers, photos, and personal effects,” said Dever, a mezzo-soprano opera singer and a longtime Sacred Heart parishioner.
“We wouldn’t call it a shrine, or a museum,” she said. “Perhaps it could be called Michael Doyle’s House of Peace because he was all about peace.”
Doyle’s will stipulates that his assets be liquidated, with the proceeds to be distributed to family members in Ireland. His only surviving sibling did not respond to an email Friday. His niece, Geraldine Dobson, said she understood the importance of the house.
Doyle “loved art and music; he loved people, and to the end, he was surrounded by his memories of everyone special to him and his very, very dear friends who cared for him with complete dedication,” she wrote in an email.
“I can understand why these [friends] would strive to keep this house intact, with all his personal effects. It embodies everything about who he was.”
The house “is on such a special street, on a block that was named Michael Doyle Lane in his honor,” said Delengowski, a retired art teacher and lifelong Camden resident.
“It’s the house where he died,” she said. “How can it be sold to just anybody?”
In addition to his work at Sacred Heart, Doyle was well-known for being among 28 antiwar activists arrested in 1971 and later acquitted of breaking into the Camden offices of the draft board.
The Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Anthony Giacchino, whose 2007 film, The Camden 28, chronicled the case and its aftermath, is among those hoping the Jasper Street house can be a resource for scholars. He’s teaching a course at Rutgers-New Brunswick about the Camden 28 and said the house would offer a unique setting for listening to recordings of Doyle’s Sunday sermons.
“They are a great record of what he was saying as a priest in Camden who always preached about poor and disadvantaged people,” he said. “Nobody could give a sermon like he did.”
Dana Payer, a 21-year-old senior and history major from Manahawkin, N.J., who took Giacchino’s course, said it “would definitely be helpful to visit the place where Father Doyle lived in Camden and see the context for everything he did.”
Cedrone, a retired social worker and longtime Sacred Heart parishioner, said Doyle “absolutely loved” the little house on Jasper Street and had founded the Heart of Camden to provide affordable housing to people in the neighborhood. About 250 homes have been renovated since 1986.
“Michael had a strong ego, but he also was humble, so I don’t think he would ever say to us” to preserve the house in his memory, Cedrone said. “But he would think that his friends would know enough to want him to have some type of memorial right in the neighborhood that he served for so many years.”
Giacchino said he understands why people would like to see the house preserved in Doyle’s memory.
“People are not ready to let go of him, and for good reason,” he said. “People will want to study the life of this city priest. And there’s so much to dig into.”
Patrick Mulligan, a Mullica Hill resident who grew up with Doyle in County Longford, Ireland, said he hasn’t been involved in any discussions about the house but understood the desire to retain it.
“There were many causes he worked on, [including] the recovery of the South Camden area,” Mulligan said. “From the point of view of retaining the memory of that, I think the house would be important.”