Thomas Joseph Toolen (February 28, 1886 – December 4, 1976) was an American clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church.

[4] On September 27, 1910, Joseph Toolen was ordained a priest by Cardinal James Gibbons at the Cathedral of the Assumption.

[5] He then went to study canon law at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he earned a Bachelor's degree in 1912.

[4] His first assignment was as a curate at St. Bernard Church in Baltimore, where he remained until he was named archdiocesan director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in 1925.

[4] On February 28, 1927, his forty-first birthday, Toolen was appointed the sixth Bishop of Mobile, Alabama, by Pope Pius XI.

[5] Toolen arrived in the Diocese of Mobile, which then comprised the entire state of Alabama and the northwestern part of Florida, on the following May 18.

Toolen opened several new churches, orphanages, hospitals, and other institutions that were meant to minister exclusively to African Americans, leading opponents to call him "the nigger bishop".

[7] In 1957, Toolen invited Mother Angelica and the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration to establish a religious community for African Americans in the Diocese of Mobile.

One of the first projects envisioned by Archbishop Thomas Joseph Toolen when he was assigned to the former Mobile-Birmingham Diocese in 1927 was the establishment of a Catholic high school in the Birmingham area.