Black History Month: Venerable Fr. John Augustus Tolton

Venerable Father John Augustus Tolton
Born in Brush Creek, Missouri on April 1, 1854, John Augustus Tolton began life with the odds stacked against him. He began life without his God-given rights of freedom, dignity and equality; he began life not as a human being, but as someone’s personal property-as a slave of a white Catholic family.
Augustus Tolton’s early childhood coincided with the Civil War; his father, Peter Paul Tolton escaped slavery to join the Union Army while his mother, Martha, remained the maid of her owners. Augustus Tolton was raised in the Roman Catholic Church; his mother was baptized a Catholic because her owners were of the Catholic faith.
In 1862, he and his family escaped slavery by bravely crossing the Mississippi River into Illinois. According to one report, when they reached freedom, Tolton’s mother turned to him and said, “John, boy, you’re free. Never forget the goodness of the Lord.” Perhaps this is when he decided to give his life to God. Perhaps this is when he realized that God is good all the time… all the time God is good. John took his mother’s advice and never forgot God’s Grace and Mercy.
With the blessing of a loving man of God, Fr. Peter McGirr, Tolton was allowed to attend St. Peter’s Catholic School, an all-white parish school in Quincy, Illinois. At the time, no American seminary would accept a black man. In 1880, with Fr. McGirr’s continued support, Tolton began his studies for priesthood in Rome.
In 1886, Tolton was ordained to the priesthood in Rome at the tender age of 31 and returned to the United States to serve the black community. Father Tolton was the first Catholic priest “publicly known to be black” when he was ordained in 1886. He held his first public Mass at St. Boniface church in Quincy, Illinois and eventually he became pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church and school.
Racial tension in Quincy still ran rampant, and Father Tolton accepted a reassignment to Chicago where he led the development and construction of St. Monica's Catholic Church as a Black "national parish," completed in 1893. In 1897, the first black Catholic priest in America, lovingly known as “Good Father Gus,” died of heatstroke after laboring all day on behalf of his parishioners in the hot July sun]. Tolton was only 43 years old, yet he left a legacy that will live forevermore: “Follow not the well-worn path. Go instead where there is no path, and blaze a trail.”
Tolton's cause for canonization was opened in 2010, and he was declared Venerable by Pope Francis in June 2019. Bishop Joseph Perry of the Archdiocese of Chicago called Father Tolton “a bright light in a difficult period of this nation’s history.”
“His life and ministry still speak to the problems of our day where communities, neighborhoods and churches continue to evidence separations among race and class and the disturbances that erupt periodically from these social contradictions,” Bishop Perry said in a statement. “Father Tolton is a model for priests and laity who live and work in these situations while they strive to work for harmony and peace among all regardless of their color, their origin, their language.”

Source:
Fr. Tolton Catholic High School, “Biography of Father Tolton” https://toltoncatholic.org/biography-of-father-tolton/
The New York Times. “Augustine Tolton, Ex-Slave and First Black Catholic Priest in U.S., Takes Step to Sainthood” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/us/father-augustus-tolton-sainthood.html