Venerable Augustus Tolton is a remarkable example of a man who overcame great odds and institutional racism to become a priest. Fr. Augustus Tolton is one of six Black Americans, including Julia Greeley, Thea Bowman and Pierre Toussaint, who are on the path towards officially being recognized as saints in the Roman Catholic Church. Fr. Augustus does not yet have an official feast day, so he is featured today in celebration of Black History Month.

Augustus was born to Catholic parents in 1854 in Missouri, which was then a slave state. During the Civil War, Augustus' father escaped into the Union Army and fought for freedom. Augustus' mother fled with her children, crossing the Mississippi River into Illinois, which was a free state.

Augustus and his family settled in Quincy, Illinois, which had a substantial Catholic population. Fr. Peter McGirr, an Irish priest, enrolled Augustus in the local Catholic school during the winter. Even in this abolitionist town, many of the parishioners objected to Fr. McGirr's inclusion of a black child in the predominantly white school. Fr. McGirr and Augustus were undeterred, however, and Fr. McGirr instructed Augustus at the school and tutored him individually, preparing him for seminary.

With McGirr's support, Augustus studied at the Franciscan Quincy University. He was rejected from every American seminary. But Augustus worked at becoming fluent in Italian and attended the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome. In Rome, Augustus was finally ordained a priest in 1886, when he was thirty-one. His first Mass was said at St. Peter's Basilica on Easter Sunday 1886. Augustus expected to be sent to Africa, but he was sent back to America, to his hometown of Quincy.

Soon, Fr. Augustus was sent to Chicago, where he developed the "national parish" of Black American Catholics, St. Monica's Catholic Church, on the South Side of Chicago. St. Katherine Drexel was one of the philanthropists who contributed to its construction. From thirty founding parishioners, in 1889, who met before the church even had its own building, St. Monica's grew rapidly after its opening in 1891 to a bustling urban church with over 600 parishioners. On July 8, 1897, at the young age of forty-three, Fr. Augustus collapsed and died as a result of the Chicago heat wave. Fr. Augustus was lovingly buried in the priest's lot of St. Peter's, back in his hometown of Quincy.

In 2010, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago announced that he was beginning an official process to open Tolton's cause for canonization. On February 13, 2012, the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints granted Tolton the title "Servant of God." On June 12, 2019 Pope Francis advanced his cause with a "Decree of Heroic Virtue," granting him the title of "Venerable." The next step in his canonization would be beatification, which would grant him the title of "Blessed."

For a full biography of Tolton and a timeline of his cause for canonization, please visit the Archdioces of Chicago website https://tolton.archchicago.org/.

Venerable Augustus Tolton, the first black Roman Catholic priest of the United States—pray for us!