Career
He was important for clarifying the right of Catholics to conscientious objector status. He began his religious career as a parish priest, and as a U.S. Army chaplain in World War I.
He taught philosophy at both St. Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania and Seton Hill College He was the first president of the Catholic University of Peking. He also was the head of the Philosophy department at Duquesne University.
In 1939, he stated that a just war was nearly impossible, because the "modern abuse of universal conscription" made wars on so gigantic a scale as to be unjustifiable. Later he testified before a Senate hearing in opposition to the Burke-Wadsworth Act, a conscription act pending before Congress in 1940. O'Toole was the author of the creationist book The Case Against Evolution (1925).
The book was dismissed by academics as a "religious and not a scientific work". Science writer Martin Gardner noted that O'Toole endorsed the "naive criticism of strata chronology" from creationist George McCready Price.
