Tolton, Augustus (John Augustine)

Impact on the world

Ordained a Catholic priest in Rome in 1886 after every American seminary refused to admit him, Tolton became the first publicly recognized Black priest in U.S. Catholic history; while James Augustine Healy, a contemporary of mixed African and Irish ancestry already profiled in this collection for his Revenue Cutter Service career, had been ordained a Catholic priest decades earlier in 1854, Healy was light-skinned enough to be widely perceived as white during his lifetime, leaving Tolton recognized as the first openly Black priest the American church accepted. In 2019, Pope Francis advanced his cause for sainthood, naming him 'Venerable,' the second of four steps toward formal canonization as the first African American Catholic saint.

Life & background

Born enslaved in Brush Creek, Missouri, Tolton's father escaped slavery to fight for the Union Army and was killed in battle, after which his mother fled north across the Mississippi River with her children, settling in Quincy, Illinois, where the family joined a predominantly German immigrant Catholic congregation. An Irish immigrant priest, Father Peter McGirr, controversially admitted young Tolton into the parish's all-white school against many parishioners' objections, and Tolton went on to graduate as valedictorian of St. Francis Solanus College in 1880; despite his evident academic gifts and fluency in German, Latin, Greek, and Italian, every American seminary he applied to rejected him because of his race, as did a London-based missionary order. With the continued support of local priests and his bishop, Tolton instead traveled to Rome's Pontifical Urban University, where he was ordained in 1886 at age 31, fully expecting to be sent as a missionary to Africa; the Vatican instead assigned him back to the United States, where he became the first publicly recognized Black Catholic priest in American history. His return to Quincy drew capacity crowds eager to witness the country's first Mass celebrated by an openly Black priest, but he also faced sustained hostility from a local pastor who resented white parishioners crossing parish lines to attend Tolton's services and from some Black Protestant ministers who feared losing members to Catholicism; in 1889 he transferred to Chicago at the invitation of a Black Catholic charitable society, where he built St. Monica's Church, the city's first dedicated Black Catholic parish, serving roughly 140 Black Catholic families on the South Side. He died unexpectedly of heatstroke in 1897 at age 43, and his cause for sainthood, dormant for over a century, was formally opened in 2010 and advanced to 'Venerable' status by Pope Francis in 2019, making him a leading candidate to become the first African American Catholic saint.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; CNN; WTTW; The Conversation; University of Notre Dame Cushwa Center; Sisters of Mercy