TOLEDO (OH)
Toledo Blade [Toledo OH]
July 19, 2026
By Ryne Hisada
It took a long while, considering the stature of the man involved and the controversy surrounding him, to pass this small ordinance of great significance.
Forty-six years after Father Gerald Robinson stabbed Sister Margaret Ann Pahl 31 times with a letter opener, leaving wounds that prosecutors said formed an inverted cross, Toledo City Council voted 8-2 Tuesday to remove a street sign honoring the priest many say helped cover up what was once called Toledo’s most notorious murder.
For Lee Pahl, Sister Pahl’s nephew, the vote offered a measure of relief decades in the making.
“It helps,” he said. “It was a terrible, terrible, crime that happened. The cover-up by the Catholic Church, to me, is the worst part of it.”
The man honored by the sign is Monsignor Jerome Schmit, a priest still widely admired for his contributions to youth sports in Toledo.
He was an enterprising figure — some called him a power broker — who once turned a $17 stipend into the city’s Catholic Youth Organization athletics program, a nonprofit that, by his retirement, had a budget in the hundreds of thousands.
He served as pastor of the Historic Church of St. Patrick, director of the Catholic Club, secretary-treasurer of the Lucas County Recreation Center, and even as a board member of the Toledo Mud Hens, which was re-established after leaving the city in the 1950s. He was also for a time chaplain for the Toledo Police Department.
It was in honor of that decorated career that St. Clair Street adjacent to the Mud Hens’ Fifth Third Field was renamed Msgr. Jerome Schmit Way on April 5, 2002.
But that sign — and indeed the very date — has come to haunt many in a city grappling with a history of clergymen abusing women and children with impunity. In 1980, April 5 was the day before Easter and the day Sister Pahl was murdered in the sacristy of Mercy Hospital.
More than two decades later in 2003, the Cold Case Unit reopened the unsolved case of Sister Pahl’s homicide, and investigators became aware that Msgr. Schmit had intervened during Robinson’s 1980 interrogation.