What’s in a Name?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 17, 2026

On June 18, the Toledo Honor Committee will consider whether a downtown street should continue to bear the name of Monsignor Jerome Schmit. For decades, the family of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl — the Toledo nun who was murdered in 1980 and whose killer walked free for twenty-five years — has urged the city to remove the honor. They are not asking for much. They are asking the city to stop honoring the man who made sure that happened.

But the question before the committee is larger than whether one name should come down. It is whether another name deserves to go up.

A street name is an endorsement. It puts a name in the mouths of thousands of people who may know nothing about the man behind it. Every address written, every set of directions given, every 911 call made from that block repeats his name — with the city’s implicit authority behind it. Toledo has been vouching for Monsignor Schmit for decades. Most residents never agreed to that. Most don’t even know they’re doing it.

The record is not ambiguous. Retired Toledo police detectives testified that Monsignor Schmit walked into their interrogation of Fr. Gerald Robinson — the sole suspect in the murder of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl — and escorted him out of police headquarters, effectively ending the investigation. Fr. Robinson walked free. The crime went unsolved for twenty-five years. He was eventually convicted of the murder. As former Blade reporter David Yonke, who covered the trial and wrote a book about the case, stated in a letter to the Honor Committee: Monsignor Schmit and the Toledo Catholic Diocese helped prevent the arrest of Fr. Robinson for the murder of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl.

Monsignor Schmit did not commit the murder. But he escorted the murderer to the getaway car.

Monsignor Schmit’s hierarchy of concern — revealed by his actions and now condoned by his continued public honor — placed the priest above the nun, the institution above the victim, and its clerical brotherhood above the city’s justice system.

Removing the names of church officials from public honors is not without precedent. But most of those cases involved the protection of abusive priests. This one involves the obstruction of a murder investigation. Toledo has the distinction of being the first American city to convict a Catholic priest of killing a nun. It should not also be the city that keeps honoring the man who nearly made sure he got away with it.

Justice was pushed aside when a monsignor — there not as a lawyer, not as a friend, but as the bishop’s representative — walked into that interrogation room and walked a murder suspect back out into the custody of the institution that would protect him for the next twenty-five years.

Which raises a different question.

If Toledo decides that this public honor no longer serves the public good, whom should it honor instead?

There is someone who does.

She never sought power or public recognition. She was a Sister of Mercy, a nurse, and a hospital administrator who spent her life caring for the sick in this city.

She was a registered nurse, a science teacher, a hospital administrator. She ran Mercy Hospital in Tiffin and Saint Charles Hospital in Toledo. In 1971 she took her final position — overseeing the chapel and sacristy at Mercy Hospital. It was, in every sense, her domain. She spent nearly five decades helping people through illness, suffering, recovery, and loss. Most of us will never know how many frightened patients she reassured or how many grieving families she comforted, because that is how a life of service works. It is not measured in headlines.

Sister Margaret Ann was choked unconscious and stabbed 31 times in the sacristy she kept. She died on Holy Saturday — one day before Easter, one day before her 72nd birthday.

Her unimaginable death should bring us to imagine her life.

Not the violence that ended it, but the service that defined it.

A city cannot change the past. It cannot undo tragedy. But it can decide what stories it wishes to carry forward.

The name of Monsignor Schmit will always lead us back to the moment three men walked into a Toledo police interrogation room and a murderer walked out.

The name of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl leads us somewhere else: to mercy, healing, and service. It leads to the common good.

The point of a public honor is to recognize someone who constructed justice in their life — not obstructed it.

There would be something especially fitting in a city extending a measure of mercy and justice to the memory of a Sister of Mercy.

Every street name eventually becomes a question. Someone asks, “Who was that?” If Toledo chose to honor Sister Margaret Ann Pahl, the answer would begin not with a murder, but with a life spent caring for others. That is a story worth telling, and a name worth repeating.

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Peter Isely is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by a Catholic priest, a co-founder of SNAP (the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests), and currently serves as Director of Nate’s Mission.