Venerable Father Augustine Tolton-the first publicly recognized Black priest in the United States-surmounted racial tensions and divisions that marked the country in the 19th century and lived a full life serving the Church and its faithful, while being loved by many.
Fr. Tolton was born into slavery in 1854 in Missouri. When he was still a child he escaped with his mother and siblings to Illinois and settled in Quincy. Although slavery was officially abolished in 1865, African Americans continued facing a lot of discrimination and even in Quincy Fr. Tolton had to change schools twice to be able to pursue an education.
He was also confronted with religious divisions, as when he was 24-years-old he opened the first school for Black children in Quincy but was met with opposition from African American Protestants who refused to send their children there as he was Catholic. It didn’t brought him down; but rather he used it “as an opportunity to continue to reach across and welcome all peoples to show them the gift of education in the life of the faith.”
As he grew older, Fr. Tolton discerned a call to the priesthood but no American seminary would accept him as a Black man. He was thus admitted in 1880 to the Pontifical Urban University in Rome as a seminarian for the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (Propaganda Fidei), the entity of the Roman Curia responsible for missionary work and which today has become the Dicastery for Evangelization. He was ordained on April 24, 1886, in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome and sent back to his home diocese to serve the faithful there.
The construction of the Shrine is an opportunity for Venerable Tolton’s story to go beyond Quincy and the United States and encourage more people to get to know him and turn to him in prayer.
