Black History Month: America’s first black priest celebrates Mass in Hoboken

Born into slavery in Missouri in 1854, Augustine (Augustus) Tolton was baptized into his mother’s Catholic faith. This required the cooperation of his parents’ “owners,” who were Catholic. The wife of the slaveholder served as Augustine’s godmother.

While Augustine was very young, his father fled Missouri across the Mississippi River into Illinois. He served with the Union Army during the Civil War and died in a military hospital in 1864. Augustine’s mother escaped bondage during the Civil War through the “Underground Railroad,” also fleeing across the dangerous Mississippi River. She settled her family in Quincy, Illinois. Sadly, the family was not welcomed by local Catholics, quite the opposite. Young Augustine was driven out of the parish school by bigoted fellow-Catholic parishioners. Augustine held a number of jobs, including working at a cigar factory. In spite of the prejudice he encountered, he faithfully continued to attend Mass and other church services. The pastor, Father McGirr, supported Augustine’s family. McGirr was a man with whom you trifled at your own risk. He had no tolerance for the intolerant.

Noticing Augustine’s devotion and faithful service as an altar boy, McGirr asked Augustus if he had considered becoming a priest. He responded: “But how, I am a Negro.” A long process of application began. No seminary in the United States would accept Tolton. He even applied to the Propagation of the Faith Seminary in Rome but was rejected. Father McGirr and the local bishop supported Tolton’s applications, but to no avail. Finally, a Franciscan, Father Richardt, was moved by the sadness that rejection brought to Tolton. He decided to “appeal to the top,” or, almost the top, to a cardinal.

Father Richardt wrote a very long letter outlining Augustine’s journey in life and desire to be ordained a priest to the Minister General of the Friars Minor (Franciscans) in Rome, the magnificently named Father Bernardino Dal Vago da Portogruaro. Father Richardt asked the Minister General to ask the Cardinal Prefect of Propagation of the Faith, Cardinal Giovanni Simeoni, to admit Tolton to the seminary — to be trained to be a missionary in Africa!

In agony, Tolton waited and waited for a reply. Tolton’s biographer recounts the story of his waiting and finally, the answer.

As the days passed, Augustine’s spirits revived. He recalled and, with steadfast faith, clung to the statement Father Schaeffermeyer (one of the local priests) had made many years earlier: “If God vonts you to be a priest, you vill be von.”

Then came that never-to-be-forgotten morning when Mrs. Tolton saw her son rushing up the street toward their shack.

“Mother,” he shouted, “I’m going to Rome. I’m going to be a priest.”

Mrs. Tolton looked at her son as though she had never seen him before. After a long moment, her eyes brimming with tears, she half-whispered: “Augustine, never forget the goodness of the Lord.”

The priests who supported him and the local bishop provided Tolton with just enough money to travel to Rome and to buy a cassock and necessary supplies. On Feb. 5, 1880, Augustine boarded a “Blacks Only” carriage on the train, beginning a journey that would take him, not to Rome, but first to Jersey City and to Hoboken. Franciscan Sisters whom he had met at their hospital in Quincy invited him to stay at their convent in Saint Mary’s Hospital in Hoboken while he waited to sail to Europe.

On Feb. 17, he arrived at the hospital to be greeted by Sister Perpetua, O.S.F.: “Gott sei Dank, Augustine, Komm herein” (Thank God, Augustine, come in!). Augustine, fluent in German, did not need an interpreter. He stayed with the sisters, visiting the nearby churches in Hoboken and Jersey City, until his ship Der Westlicher, left from Hoboken on Feb. 21. Arriving in Le Havre on March 4, he went first to Paris and then by train to Rome where his journey ended on March 10. He records a simple prayer in the first church he visited in Rome: “My Lord Jesus Christ, I got here!”

The next six years of diligent study and daily discipline molded Augustine into a man of moral strength and courage. He would need these qualities. The day before his ordination to the priesthood, April 23, 1886, Augustine was surprised to be told that he would not be going to Africa, but to the United States. Cardinal Simeoni told the officials of Propaganda that, “America needs Negro priests. America has been called the most enlightened nation. We will see whether it deserves that honor.” Augustine wept bitter tears, writing: “Back to America? Back to the country where I was a slave, an outcast, a hated Black? Must I go back to America where I was not wanted as a priest? …Lord, I can conquer ignorance weakness, and heathenism. But Lord, I cannot conquer the race hatred in America.”

The next day he was ordained, and the day after, arranged by Simeoni, he celebrated his first Mass at an altar usually reserved for cardinals in front of the main altar of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Now it was back to America via Hoboken and Jersey City. He made his way to England where he boarded the Cunard liner Gallia in Liverpool and arrived in New York on July 6, 1886. The next day he fulfilled his promise to Sister Perpetua and celebrated his first Mass in the United States in the chapel of Saint Mary’s Hospital in Hoboken.

Tolton returned to Quincy where some priests said he should minister only to black Catholics. However, many whites, Catholic and Protestant, attended services he conducted. Unfortunately, he soon was subjected to vicious bigotry not only from anti-Catholic Protestants, but from his fellow Catholics. Some of the worst hatred, it is sad to say, was expressed by fellow Catholic Priests. They were jealous. Tolton’s preaching was so good that their white parishioners began to attend the Black church!

Tolton became frustrated with such bigotry and asked to be transferred to Chicago. He moved there in 1889 and ministered to an impoverished congregation of 600 African Americans. He still faced discrimination from fellow priests, yet continued to minister to the destitute. At 43, in 103-degree heat, walking home from a three-day retreat, he suffered heat stroke and died.

On his ordination day, Venerable Father Augustine Tolton wrote:

“The Catholic Church deplores a double slavery – that of the mind and that of the body.  She endeavors to free us of both. I was a poor slave boy, but the priests of the Church did not disdain me. It was through the influence of one of them that I became what I am tonight. I must now give praise to that son of the Emerald Isle, Father Peter McGirr, pastor of St. Peter’s Church in Quincy, who promised me that I would be educated and who kept his word. It was the priests of the Church who taught me to pray and to forgive my persecutors… it was through the direction of a Sister of Notre Dame, Sister Herlinde, that I learned to interpret the Ten Commandments; and then I also beheld for the first time the glimmering light of truth and the majesty of the Church. In this Church we do not have to fight for our rights because we are black. She had colored saints – Augustine, Benedict the Moor, Monica. The Church is broad and liberal. She is the Church for our people.”

Elsewhere he wrote:

“As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.”

“We should welcome all people into the church, not send them away.”

“Being configured to Christ means emptying ourselves so that God can fill us.”

Notes:

Augustine Tolton was the first Catholic priest in the United States publicly known to be Black. James Augustine Healy, bishop of Portland, Maine, ordained in 1854, and his brother, Patrick Francis Healy, president of Georgetown University, ordained in 1864, were of mixed race, and their mixed-race ancestry was not widely known outside of a limited family and ecclesiastical circle.

Tolton’s biographer, Sister Caroline Hemesath, writes that Tolton was baptized “Augustine.” This was a common name among Black Catholics as Augustine was a saint from Africa. Many references refer to Father Tolton as Augustus. The Vatican adds to the confusion. In their news bulletin announcing that Tolton was “Venerable,” the English version refers to him as “Augustus,” the Italian version names him as “Agostino,” the Italian version of Augustine. We should follow Sister Caroline’s research.

Sister cites the baptismal record of “Augustine (Tolton) (Slave of Stephen Elliott) followed by the dates of his birth and baptism, April 1, 1854 and May 29, 1854.

Msgr. Robert J. Wister, Hist.Eccl.D. is a retired professor of church history at Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology, Seton Hall University, and writes historical articles for the publications of the Archdiocese of Newark.