The white Richmond Alms

Play about first African-American priest in U.S. highlights current issues

Religion News Service

PASADENA, Calif. Actor Jim Coleman stood at the front of a dimly lit stage and recounted the joys and hardships of being a black man of Catholic faith. As the star of the play “Tolton: From Slave to Priest,” Mr. Coleman was portraying the life baptized in his former owners’ Catholic faith, faced pushback from peers and parents while attending all-white Catholic parish schools, according to Rev. Tolton’s biography provided by the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Undeterred, Rev. Tolton pursued the priesthood, studying in Italy after U.S. seminaries refused to admit a black man. He was ordained

Photo courtesy of Saint Luke Productions Jim Coleman portrays Father Augustus Tolton in “Tolton: From Slave to Priest.”

of the Rev. Augustus Tolton, the first known African-American to serve as a Catholic priest in the United States.

The one-man multimedia performance, presented by Saint Luke Productions, toured several parishes in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles during Black History Month.

Rev. Tolton, born into a family of enslaved people in Missouri, escaped during the Civil War with his mother and siblings and settled in Illinois. His father had already escaped to join the Union army and his family later learned of his death.

In Illinois, Rev. Tolton, who had been at the age of 31 in 1886.

In the play, Rev. Tolton refers to the United States as “foreign land” where, after “living in freedom for six years,” he returned after finishing the seminary.

Rev. Tolton was sent to Chicago, where he helped oversee the construction of St. Monica’s Catholic Church, an African-American parish. Known as “Father Gus,” Rev. Tolton spent much of his career seeking help for the poor in the community.

In June 2019, Pope Francis officially declared that Rev. Tolton “lived a life of heroic virtue,” and the priest is now on the path for sainthood. His cause for canonization was opened by the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2010.

In Pasadena, the seats were filled for a showing of the play at St. Andrew Catholic School in mid-February. Some cheered and others cried as the play demonstrated how Rev. Tolton’s faith helped him cope with the racism he encountered before he went into the seminary.

“People need to see that their spiritual life can help give them the strength to persevere in troubling times,” said Edwina Clay, president of the Altadena/Pasadena Black Catholic Association, who said the play was still relevant.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which hosts Masses in about 40 languages, has been lauded for its diversity, but in its more than 80-year history, only one U.S.-born black pastor has served in its parishes.

It’s a problem that spills down to the pews, Ms. Clay said. “If young people don’t see folks who look like them, they don’t have any aspiration to be like them.”

Black Catholics have made up a stable 3 percent of U.S. Catholic membership for decades, with significant numbers of AfricanAmericans in dioceses in Brooklyn, N.Y.; Los Angeles; San Bernardino, Calif.; and Baltimore, according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

(Of the 222,000 Catholics in the Diocese of Richmond, 6,200 are African-American, officials said in late 2018.)

To Anderson Shaw, director of the AfricanAmerican Catholic Center for Evangelization, the play helps bring visibility to the black Catholic community in the United States.

“By having visibility, it allows us to have a voice,” Mr. Shaw said.

The play, he said, is not simply a reaction to past injustices.

“One can get encouragement and inspiration from stories,” Mr. Shaw said. “Our intent is to inspire people, to encourage them to lift themselves up when things get a little tough.”

Mr. Shaw said the play was included in a pastoral plan that came out of a 2017 meeting of the National Black Catholic Congress that addressed the lack of African- American priests.

Image courtesy of Creative Commons Father Augustus Tolton in 1887.

In the pastoral plan, the group pledged to stand against racism and to work on issues such as mass incarceration and domestic violence, Mr. Shaw said.

“You have people saying the church is not racist,” he said. But if you ask parishioners if they have experienced racism in the church, “the answer is going to be yes.”

Local parish leaders and congregants need to do more to draw African-Americans into the priesthood, he said. There can be pastoral plans, Mr. Shaw said, but “the people in the pews don’t relate to that.”

As a sign of progress, Mr. Shaw pointed to the Rev. Jeffrey Harvey, an African-American Vincentian priest, who is teaching homiletics — the art of preaching and delivering sermons — at St. John’s Seminary, where men are prepared for the priesthood in the Los Angeles archdiocese.

African-Americans are big on preachers, Mr. Shaw said. “If you ask them what was the most important part of the Mass, it’s the singing and preaching,” he said.

To have Rev. Harvey teaching Los Angeles’ next generation of priests how to preach is significant, he said.

Josh Reynolds/Associated Press Images for Human Rights Campaign Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David speaks during the 37th Annual HRC New England dinner in November 2019. The annual HRC dinner brings hundreds of LGBTQ advocates and allies together for an evening of celebration across greater New England.

Human Rights Campaign kicks off election focus on LGBTQ, religious relations

By Adelle M. Banks Religion News Service

The Human Rights Campaign, which works to promote LGBTQ equality, has started an election season tour in which its president will visit houses of worship of different faiths to build relations between the religious and the gay communities.

“The cornerstones of religion and faith and the LGBTQ movement are the same — inclusion and justice,” said HRC President Alphonso David in a statement released Sunday as he started the tour.

“LGBTQ people are in every faith tradition, and LGBTQ people and people of faith have more similarities than they do differences.”

The African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia was the first stop on the tour.

The national tour is tied to HRC’s voter mobilization efforts in which its volunteers plan to urge congregants to get family members and friends to join them in voting in upcoming elections. Last year, a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute showed there is broad support across the United States for gay rights, with 69 percent of Americans supporting nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. Researchers found agreement across religious groups as well, from 90 percent of Unitarian Universalists and 80 percent of Jews, to 54 percent of white evangelical Protestants and 53 percent of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The pastor of the Philadelphia church, founded in 1792, welcomed Mr. David’s visit.

“St. Thomas has a history of engaging in outreach to the community around us and ensuring that the welcoming love we see in the Gospels is felt by everyone we serve, including LGBTQ people,” said the Very Rev. Martini Shaw, rector of the church, in a statement. “As we begin the season of Lent, we encourage everyone to reflect on the ways in which people of faith can begin finding common ground with LGBTQ people in their communities.”

Michael Vazquez, director of the HRC Foundation Religion and Faith Program, said Mr. David’s tour is expected to also include evangelical churches, mosques and synagogues.

“As the tour progresses, we will work towards the goal of finding common ground between the LGBTQ community, LGBTQ people of faith and communities of faith, while we work to advance justice and equity for the whole LGBTQ community,” he said in a statement.

The tour comes as the United Methodist Church, one of the nation’s largest Protestant denominations, ponders a breakup in an attempt to end a long-running debate over the status of LGBTQ people in the church.

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