Father Augustus Tolton

Augustus John Tolton was born into slavery on the first of April 1854 on the Stephen Elliott plantation in Brush Creek, Ralls County, Missouri, the second of three sons of Peter Paul Tolton and Martha Jane Chisley — both enslaved members of the household and both Catholic. His parents had been baptised in childhood at St Peter's parish in Brush Creek. With the outbreak of the Civil War his father escaped to enlist in the Union Army and was killed of disease at St Louis in 1862. His mother in 1862 carried her three small children across the Mississippi River in a rowboat under Confederate fire to the free state of Illinois at Quincy.

He grew up at Quincy, where the Franciscan priest Peter McGirr admitted him to St Peter's parochial school over the substantial objection of the parish — Father McGirr, of County Tyrone, told the protesting parishioners that any further objection would be answered with his immediate transfer of the parish school out of their use. Augustus completed the primary curriculum at twelve and, refused admission to every American seminary on grounds of race, was eventually accepted by the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda Fide at Rome in 1880 — the missionary seminary that trained priests for service in non-Catholic territories worldwide. He completed the six-year programme and was ordained at the Basilica of St John Lateran on the twenty-fourth of April 1886, at thirty-two.

The Propaganda had intended him for service in Africa. On the eve of his departure Cardinal Giovanni Simeoni decided otherwise: "America has been called the most enlightened nation; we will see if it deserves that honour. If America has never seen a Black priest, it must see one now." Father Tolton offered his first Mass at St Benedict the Moor in New York and was assigned to St Joseph's parish in Quincy. The white pastor of the adjoining German parish refused him use of the confessional after his first year and successfully petitioned the bishop for his transfer.

He was reassigned to Chicago in December 1889 and founded St Monica's — the African American parish at South Indiana Avenue — building it from a basement chapel into a congregation of six hundred. He collapsed in a Chicago heat wave on the eighth of July 1897 and died the following day, at forty-three. His cause for canonization was opened in 2010; he was declared Venerable by Pope Francis in 2019.

He is honored here as the first publicly known African American Catholic priest.