VENERABLE AUGUSTUS TOLTON: THE PATH TO THE FIRST BLACK SAINT

by Suzanne Hanney

BORN A SLAVE, Father Augustus Tolton was the first African American to be ordained a Roman Catholic priest, in 1886. Tolton is also on a path to become possibly the first Black saint in U.S. history.

Tolton would be a saint for these times, says the Most Rev. Joseph Perry, auxiliary bishop of Chicago, because he was a Black man who persevered through great trials, suffered patiently, practiced works of mercy and evangelized to South Side poor with a focus on saving souls and spreading God’s love.

“Yes, he did all of that. He is an example for African Americans because he went through the worst of their historic experience. He encompasses Black history. In his whole life, he was told the word ‘No’ more than anything,” said Perry, who is postulator for Tolton’s cause with the Vatican, in a telephone interview.

“Everywhere he turned, there were these blockages,” Perry continued. “The country was in this visual and emotional dissonance whenever a Black person entered spaces they were not allowed to enter. Everywhere he turned, he was running into these obstacles. He was a priest to everyone, but when white people were gravitating to him, he was told to leave them alone and make sure their contributions got to white churches.”

This is one of two murals on the outside walls of St. Elizabeth Church on Michigan Avenue and 41st Street in Chicago. The section highlights Father Augustine Tolton, the first universally recognized black Catholic priest in the United States. He founded St. Monica Church (symbolized by a small church structure) at 36th & Dearborn in the 1890s. This congregation merged with St. Elizabeth in 1924. Two other figures are part of this section: Mother Katharine Drexel, SBS, whose Blessed Sacrament Sisters have ministered both at St. Monica and at St. Elizabeth elementary and high schools; and Father Peter Claver, after whom the Knights of St. Peter Claver are named.

(Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic photo)

Tolton was a household name when Perry was an African American seminarian in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But it was Cardinal Francis George, who was so moved after reading Tolton’s definitive biography, “From Slave to Priest,” by Caroline Hemesath, S.S.F. (Ignatius Press, 1973/2006) that he mentioned in passing to Perry that he was contemplating asking Rome to consider Tolton for possible sainthood.

Cardinal George, in 2011, initiated Tolton’s case with the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, in Rome. A working document, or positio of 1,000 pages was compiled, with historic testimonies by witnesses of the Black priest’s life. A nine-member team of theologians unanimously recommended him, as did a committee of cardinals, and then Pope Francis, in June 2019.

Tolton was then given the title “Venerable.” That means he lived according to theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, and the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance at a heroic level in surmounting the challenges set before him.

“Lessons from his early life as a slave and the prejudice he endured in becoming a priest still apply today with our current problems of racial and social injustices and inequities that divide neighborhoods, churches and communities by race, class and ethnicity,” Perry said in archdiocesan prepared material in 2019.

The slavery experience within African American history provides important insights to American Catholic life because African Americans have faced resistance from nearly every institution, Perry told the National Catholic Register in 2016. “How [do] you get through that and still hold onto your faith in God, still have a sense of hope, and still have some sense of charity toward your neighbor who is not Black? I think that’s the legacy of the Black struggle.”

Tolton was a 9-year-old slave on the Stephen Elliot plantation in Brush Creek, Mo., in July 1863, when Elliot died, leaving the plantation in debt.

Augustus and his brother, Charley, one year older, had already been field hands with lash marks on their bodies when Elliot’s widow, Ann, had the plantation appraised– including its slaves. Augustus was valued at $25, Charley at $100, their 20-month-old baby sister Anne at $75 and their mother, Martha, at $59.

This sign now marks the spot of the former St. Joseph Church.

(Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic photo)

Martha knew that a slave sale would undoubtedly mean that her family would be split up. That’s what happened when she had been given as part of Ann’s wedding dowry in 1849. Martha had later married Peter Tolton, who went to fight with the Union Army in the Civil War and who died in a military hospital. All alone, Martha decided to flee with her children on the Underground Railroad.

Despite the Emancipation Proclamation signed earlier in 1863, the Fugitive Slave Act was still being enforced. Captured slaves were returned to their masters. Those who assisted would-be escapees paid devastating fines.

When the Toltons reached Hannibal on the Mississippi River, Confederate soldiers tried to arrest them – but Union soldiers intervened and said the family was standing on federal soil. The Yankee soldiers also helped the Toltons find a boat to row cross the mile-wide Mississippi. Once ashore, the family traveled another 21 miles north to Quincy, IL, which had a free Black population of 300.

Mrs. Tolton, Charley and Augustus found jobs at the Harris Tobacco factory in Quincy. They stood for 10 hours a day, six days a week, removing the stems from 3-foot to 4-foot stalks so that someone else could roll the leaves into cigars. Employees breathed tobacco dust and experienced dizziness and addiction. Augustus worked there nine years.

Augustus went to the German parish school during the three winter months of 1865, when the tobacco factory was closed, but quit after a month when parishioners threatened to withdraw their children and leave the parish. A nun at the school discovered his ability to speak German and English, however, and tutored him before and after hours.

Three years later, he attended an all-Black school, but he was dark-skinned, tall for his age, behind in reading and he smelled of tobacco. He was bullied by his classmates but eventually accepted. He then spent off-seasons at the Irish parish school, whose pastor also employed him as janitor for six years. After he graduated in 1872, at age 18, he started a ministry for impoverished Black families in Quincy.

Cardinal Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, dedicates Catholic Charities’ Father Augustus Tolton Peace Center on May 24, 2018. The Father Augustus Tolton Peace Center and Peace Garden in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood is a community resource center and “peace hub” for violence prevention and trauma therapy programs.

(Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic photo)

These nuns and priests realized Augustus might be able to help his people, post-slavery, Perry said. “They were visionary – that evangelization would go nowhere unless the people could see clergy who looked like them. These people saw things others could not see.”

Augustus studied Latin and within a year was reading Caesar. He was tutored by another priest for two years in Latin, Greek, German, geography and in U.S., ancient and modern history before he entered St. Francis Solano College, now Quincy University, where he was ahead of his class.

Excellent recommendations notwithstanding, none of 18 seminaries in the United States accepted Tolton as a candidate for the priesthood. Their general response was that they were “not ready” to accept a Black candidate.

Eventually, his mentors decided to apply to the Urban College of the Propaganda Fide in Rome, which was founded by a 17th century pope to do missionary work. After Tolton arrived at its location near the Spanish Steps, he found he was no longer the only person of color; he was joined by students from Syria, Cyprus, Greece, Australia, Sri Lanka, Africa and the Middle East. Nearly 6 feet tall, he was known as “Gus,” or “Gus from the U.S.,” and amazed at the lack of prejudice he encountered.

Perry recalled Tolton’s quote, “Everybody here loves me, and I don’t know why.”

Wearing the college’s distinctive black cassock with scarlet sash and biretta, a four-cornered hat with red tassel, Tolton navigated Rome without issue for his six years of study. He performed daily acts of goodness. He learned to play the accordion and in a baritone voice, he sang both traditional African American spirituals and the songs of other nations, during recreational hours. He sketched Roman ecclesiastical art and architecture.

Cardinal Cupich was the main celebrant at a Mass of Thanksgiving honoring Venerable Rev. Augustus Tolton on Oct. 14, 2019 at St. Philip Neri Church, 2132 E. 72nd St., Chicago. The Mass celebrated Pope Francis’ June 11, 2019 declaration of Tolton as “Venerable.” He is the first African American priest to receive this designation, a step toward possible sainthood.

(Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic photo)

Tolton had expected to become a missionary to Africa, but on the day before his Holy Saturday, April 24, 1886 ordination, he received a rude awakening.

Cardinal Giovanni Simeoni, prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (now known as the Congregation for Evangelization of Peoples), was instead sending Tolton back to the United States. The U.S. was still missionary territory as far as the Catholic Church was concerned.

“America has been called the most enlightened nation,” Simeoni said. “We will see if it deserves the honor. If America has never seen a [Black] priest, it will see one now.”

Church officials did not expect Tolton to surmount the odds, Joyce Duriga wrote in “Augustus Tolton: The Church is the True Liberator” (Liturgical Press 2018). “He was a sacrificial lamb in some ways, as are all pioneers in history.”

Initially, things went well for Tolton back in Quincy. The Quincy Journal of July 26, 1886, covering an early mass by the native son, referred to “his fine educational training,” his “oratorical ability,” his “rich and full voice which falls pleasantly on the ear” and his “whole-souled earnestness.”

When Tolton noticed adults standing at the rear at the beginning of his sermons, he beckoned with both arms, Hemesath wrote. Children understood, and ran forward to sit on the floor around his feet, which freed seats for adults. He was the main speaker at the First Catholic Colored Congress in Washington D.C. in 1889. Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore later engaged him to speak before a mixed audience. He also spoke in Boston and New York and for a predominantly white audience in Galveston, TX.

Father Augustine Tolton founded St. Monica Church at 36th & Dearborn in Chicago in the 1890s. The congregation merged with St. Elizabeth Church in 1924.

(Photo courtesy of Archdiocese of Chicago Archives and Records Center)

Was Tolton too good at his work?

Yes, Perry said.

By the time Tolton drew 35 Blacks and 200 whites to his services in Quincy, a German priest complained to the bishop, who told Tolton to confine his ministry to Blacks. “He had an open disposition about him that was a cut above the average priest in Quincy. Tolton did not have the energy or the disposition to tell whites to stay out of his church. It wasn’t in his nature. People came voluntarily. He didn’t recruit them. They found him to be an image of what priests should do well: being open to people and ministering to their needs. That desire to be open and not question anybody’s background before you minister to them proved to be his undoing,” Perry said.

The German priest’s jealousy became so intense that Tolton looked for another city. Archbishop Patrick Feehan of Chicago rescued him, as Perry put it, and let him make a new start.

In late 1889, Tolton was sent first to St. Mary’s Church at 9th Street and Wabash Avenue, which had invited Blacks to form a St. Augustine Society. They prayed together and maintained a common fund, augmented by white friends, to help the poor, visit the sick, bury their dead. However, the fund drew heavily for “corporal works of mercy,” Hemesath wrote.

Slaves had been freed by the Civil War, but their problems were not over, because there were no programs to help them assimilate into mainstream society, Perry told the National Catholic Register. “So they were left kind of haphazardly out there to experience whatever they were going to experience and be treated every which way.”

The first generation out of slavery also lacked community support. Hemesath quoted the Conservator newspaper that there were two predominant classes of Blacks in Chicago. The “respectables” were regular churchgoers and moderately prosperous; the “refined” had more education and money and considered themselves defenders of their race.

More prosperous Blacks did not want to be “pulled down by the freed people, thinking them uneducated, uncouth and threatening to their standing in society,” Duriga wrote. The “refined” even used ridicule and sarcasm to try to change the new lower class, Hemesath wrote.

Four months after Tolton took over services in St. Mary’s basement, he had 200 regular attendees, who were committed to building their own church. He also attracted a great number of people to a storefront church in the 2200 block of South Indiana Ave., which was closer to where many of his parishioners lived.

This foot bridge at the end of 35th Street in the Bronzeville neighborhood crosses train tracks and is the approximate location of a former train stop where Tolton disembarked the day he died. Participants joined Bishop Joseph Perry for a pilgrimage to historic sites in Chicago of Fr. Augustus Tolton in April 2012. Stops included where he collapsed from heat stroke, former site of St. Monica's Church at 36th and Dearborn streets, and the grave site of his mother.

(Karen Callaway/Chicago Catholic photo)

An earlier donation of $10,000 had been earmarked for a Black church and in 1891, Feehan laid the cornerstone for St. Monica’s Church, at 36th and Dearborn Streets. Meanwhile, the St. Augustine Society had located a rectory for Tolton at 448 W. 36th St., so that he could bring his mother and sister to Chicago.

Tolton was in demand as a speaker, and he put the fees into the church building fund, but he was reluctant to leave his parish members. “I must say at this moment I wish there were 27 Father Toltons, or [Black] priests at any rate, who could supply the demands,” he wrote on Jan. 25, 1890. “There are 27 letters here before me all asking me to come and lecture.”

Tolton was less concerned with brick and mortar than with his parishioners’ welfare. Instead, building fund money often went to their food, medicine, clothes and shelter.

The congregation, Perry said, consisted of people who came to church to be helped. They were “a lot of former slaves, displaced people, homeless abject poor. There were no welfare societies so people were scrounging, eking out an existence for themselves.”

Tolton continued to put his parishioners first, and by the late 1890s, they could see changes in his health. He moved more slowly, he sat down while preaching. There was perspiration on his forehead and his hand shook while distributing communion.

“He is left to struggle on almost alone - in poverty and humility grappling with the giant task of founding a church and congregation in Chicago,” wrote a parishioner. “He was living in poverty with his people, he did not receive a salary and he rarely had a break,” Duriga noted.

Still, Tolton wrote to a large donor he had been able to administer last rites to a Black woman who nine years earlier had been “hurled out of a white church and even cursed at by the Irish members. She sent for me and thanked God that she had a priest to send for.”

Shortly afterward, Tolton did take a break at a religious retreat in Bourbonnais, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago. He returned home July 9, 1897 to 105-degree heat. He got off the train at noon at 35th and the lake, intending to call on parishioners on his way home to 448 W. 36th St. Instead, he keeled over at 35th and Ellis Avenue. Bystanders pulled him to a cooler spot and a police patrol took him to Mercy Hospital, then at 2525 S. Michigan Ave. That night, he died of heatstroke and uremia. He was 43.

Father Augustine Tolton, also known as Augustus, is pictured in an undated photo. Born into slavery in Missouri, he was ordained a priest April 24, 1886, in Rome, and said his first Mass at St. Peter's Basilica. He served as pastor at St. Joseph Church in Quincy, Ill., and later established St. Monica's Church in Chicago.

(photo courtesy of Archdiocese of Chicago Archives and Records Center)

The next step toward sainthood for Venerable Augustus Tolton would be a miracle for someone who prayed to God through Tolton. Physicians would cite someone who is still alive, for example, for reasons unknown to medical science, Perry said.

At that point, he would be beatified and given the title of Blessed Augustus Tolton. A second miracle would elevate him to sainthood. The miracles are a sign that God wills Tolton to be so honored, Perry said.

The Catholic Church relies on the candidate’s reputation for holiness in the community, “which is why we go around giving presentations about his life, especially in places that have never heard of him before. Action comes from people in the pews.”

Perry was in North Dakota recently and will go to Louisiana in April, along with California, Georgia, the Carolinas and Texas. Tolton Ambassadors in larger cities like Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia go deeper into the community. Social media has brought inquiries from Germany, the Philippines, Italy and Korea.

As Perry told the National Catholic Register, “If we had an African-American saint, it would message to African-Americans that we have finally arrived in the Church, that we finally have something to offer, that holiness is possible from amongst those of our ethnic stripe, that the contribution we have been making to the Church for several hundred years is finally recognized.”

For more information, please visit tolton.archchicago.org

VENDOR A. ALLEN: TOLTON IS A BLACK HERO

VENDOR A. ALLEN

Not only is Augustus Tolton a Black hero in the Black community, being the first African American to be ordained a Roman Catholic priest, but I can really appreciate the Most Rev. Joseph Perry, auxiliary bishop of Chicago, for his recognition and acknowledgement of the legacy of this great man’s time on Earth, especially on Chicago’s South Side, from 1889 to 1897.

Yes, this is Black History Month and what can be more appropriate than writing about this young man who went from slave to priest. Augustus was a 9-year-old on a Missouri plantation whose master had died. He was in danger of being sold and was appraised at $25, his mother Martha at $59. With the threat of being separated, they escaped on the Underground Railroad to Illinois.

He was fortunate enough to be a Christian and to avoid being incarcerated or put on a prison gang. But many Blacks were free and basically went into another form of slavery, whether sharecropping or being incarcerated. It’s almost like the “Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song” written by Chips Moman and made famous by B.J. Thomas.

Yes, this is the same story. Tolton was good at what he did. Other priests admired him, but were also resentful of his success, and they used his Blackness to reject him.

It reminds me of a passage from Isaiah 53:3 KJV: “He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief. We hid as it were our faces from him. He was despised and we esteemed him not.” The same story, but a different man (victim).

I am grateful to Bishop Perry for pushing this issue and for postulating Father Tolton’s cause for sainthood with the Vatican so that he can become the first Black saint from the U.S. From a Black man’s point of view, while he was alive, the answer was always “no.” And while he is dead, the answer should be “yes” to his sainthood.