| Barry O'Toole | |
| Office: | 1st President of Fu Jen Catholic University |
| Term Start: | 1925 |
| Term End: | 1929 |
| Successor: | Chen Yuan (historian) |
| Birth Date: | 1886 |
| Birth Place: | Toledo, Ohio |
| Death Place: | Washington, D.C. |
| Alma Mater: | St. John College, Toledo, Ohio |
| Honorific Prefix: | The Reverend |
| Honorific Suffix: | OSB |
George Barry O'Toole, OSB (1886 – 26 March 1944[1]) was an American Catholic priest and activist. He was a member of the Benedictines and a founding member of the Catholic Radical Alliance.[2]
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 (rector) of the Catholic University of Peking.[3] He also was the head of the Philosophy department at Duquesne University.
He was a founding member of the Catholic Radical Alliance, an early labor support organization in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was important to the foundation of St. Joseph's House of Hospitality, also in Pittsburgh.
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.[4] 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".[5]
Science writer Martin Gardner noted that O'Toole endorsed the "naive criticism of strata chronology" from creationist George McCready Price.[6]