Remembering D. Jay Koyle

The Very Reverend Dr. Donald Jay Koyle died on Friday, March 13, 2026, at the Sault Area Hospital with his wife by his side.

D. Jay Koyle was my professor in school, my colleague in priesthood, and my friend in life and work.

People outside the Church may not fully understand what it means to be a liturgist, never mind one who served at national and international levels. Jay did. He carried that vocation with beauty, depth, seriousness, and grace. He knew that liturgy is not performance, decoration, or particularity for its own sake. It is the prayer of the Church. It is one of the ways a people are formed by God.

At Huron University College, Jay taught not only in the classroom but by example. He embodied the life of liturgy through the depth of his prayer, the seriousness of his reverence, and the gift of his voice. He was an artist of prayer. For many of us, his voice sounds like prayer itself.

But Jay’s gifts were never only aesthetic or academic. He was deeply human. He was real. He could be honest without being cruel, serious without being rigid, and pastoral without pretence. I remember him once telling me that I needed to love my mother more, and to be more forgiving of myself. That was Jay: wise, gracious, direct, and attentive to the things that matter most.

The photographs I carry from 2019 at St. Paul’s Cathedral remain especially precious now. In them, my son Rory is in and around the liturgical space: at the pulpit, near the altar, and in the cathedral’s chairs and stalls. Those images matter to me because Jay taught, by instinct and example, that children are not distractions from worship. They belong in it. They have a central place in the Church’s prayer.

That says something important about Jay. He knew that reverence and welcome belong together. Beauty and humanity belong together. Tradition is not preserved by becoming brittle, but by being lived faithfully and full.

With his death on March 13, in the days just before St. Patrick’s Day, it feels right to say that Jay had something of that old Catholic breadth about him: a Notre Dame fan, an Anglican priest, and a man too grounded in grace to mistake tribe for truth.

Jay knew grace.

He knows it still.

Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon him.