Jubilee pilgrims with Chicago bishop visit places of Fr. Tolton’s Baptism, burial
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Behind bishop, priests, candles and crucifix, the people processed to a shady corner of St. Peter Cemetery in Brush Creek.
Bishop Joseph N. Perry splashed holy water onto the new memorial to the people buried in formerly unmarked graves in the cemetery’s slave section.
“O God, by whose mercy the faithful departed find rest, bless this monument with which we mark the unmarked graves of people who were enslaved,” he prayed. “May they have everlasting life and rejoice in you with your saints forever.”
Some at rest beneath that acre are likely relatives of Venerable Father Augustus Tolton, a candidate for being declared a saint, who was baptized near where the current St. Peter Chapel in Brush Creek stands.
Bishop Perry, retired auxiliary bishop of Chicago and co-postulator of Fr. Tolton’s sainthood cause, led a Holy Week/Jubilee Year of Hope pilgrimage on Monday, April 14, from rural Shelby County to Brush Creek and to Quincy, Illinois.
These are locales associated with the life, ministry and death of the Roman Catholic Church’s first recognizably Black priest in this country.
“He’s actually yours,” Bishop Perry told the pilgrims. “He is your neighbor. He lived here. He served here. And we look forward to the day when you can claim him as your patron saint.”
A priest forever
About 150 people, including students from Fr. McCartan Memorial School in Marceline, took part in all or portions of the pilgrimage.
It began at Camp Tolton Lodge and Retreat Center near Shelbina, where Bishop Perry addressed the pilgrims and showed them an intensive documentary film about Fr. Tolton.
The bishop spoke about how through 2,000 years of Catholic history, certain men and women have received the Gospel of the Lord and lived it with heroic seriousness.
“That’s why they are named saints,” Bishop Perry stated. “These are the special people who modeled for us what the Christian life is all about.”
He’s convinced that northeastern Missouri was home to one such person “who lived a heroic life in some interesting and difficult times.”
Fr. Tolton (1854-97), born into a family of enslaved people in rural Monroe County, was baptized Catholic in the old log church near where the stone St. Peter Chapel in Brush Creek now stands.
His father joined the Union Army at the beginning of the Civil War, and the rest of the family made a daring escape across the Mississippi River into Illinois, a free state, soon thereafter.
They did so to avoid being sold off and separated from one another.
The children’s mother, Martha Jane Tolton, continued to form them in the faith after her husband died in the war.
The teachers at St. Peter School in Quincy, Illinois, helped young “Gus” catch up on his studies in religion and secular subjects.
Over time, he recognized and relentlessly pursued his priestly calling, despite that no Catholic seminary in this country at that time would enroll a Black man.
With help from priests, religious sisters and brothers and other friends in Quincy, he was eventually accepted into the Pontifical Urbanum Seminary of the Vatican department of The Propagation of the Faith.
The Urbanum’s mission is to help seminarians from all over the world prepare to serve in missionary outposts throughout the globe.
Fr. Tolton studied there for six years and was ordained to the Holy Priesthood in St. John Lateran Basilica in Rome on Holy Saturday, 1886.
The cardinal prefect of the Propagation of the Faith sent the new priest back to Quincy to serve as a missionary in the place where he had grown up and ministered as a lay catechist.
“He worked at the Mission of St. Joseph in Quincy for a while, until things turned difficult for him,” said Bishop Perry. “He was rescued by an archbishop in Chicago, and that’s where he lived the rest of his days.”
Fr. Tolton was leading a growing parish of Black Catholics on Chicago’s Southside when he died of heatstroke in July of 1897, at age 43.
Thousands attended his Funeral Masses in Chicago and back in Quincy, where he had stated he wanted to be buried.
The Chicago archdiocese opened a sainthood cause for him in 2010.
Fr. Tolton’s postulators spent more than five years preparing an exhaustive historical dossier about his life and ministry.
After Vatican officials meticulously reviewed the document, Pope Francis concluded that Fr. Tolton had exhibited heroic virtue throughout his life, and bestowed on him the title Venerable.
People continue to pray for favors and miracles that can be attributed to God through Fr. Tolton’s intercession.
Such a miracle, upon being thoroughly investigated and verified, would allow Fr. Tolton to be declared Blessed.
Another would be needed for him to be declared a saint.
Up-close and personal
Bishop Perry described how Fr. Tolton lived, ministered and endured tremendous hardships during and after the Civil War — times of great division in this country.
“A subtext to that conflict was the whole question of whether White and Black people could live together or be together,” said Bishop Perry, who himself is a Black descendant of enslaved people.
“Somehow, we did not solve that question very well,” he stated. “And in the midst of that strange situation in our country emerged an individual, a young man who was born here in Brush Creek.”
People of all races now look up to “Fr. Gus” for help and inspiration.
“I think most people who are attached to his story are inspired by seeing him not only as the first link in a long chain of the African-American Catholic experience, but a model of Christian life, a model of a Christian who lived some of the darker experiences of life and came out with his faith and his hope and his love intact,” Bishop Perry stated.
Joining the visiting bishop at the altar for Mass in Brush Creek were Father Greg Oligschlaeger, pastor of Holy Rosary Parish in Monroe City and St. Stephen Parish in Indian Creek; Father William Peckman, pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in Macon and St. Mary Parish in Shelbina; and Monsignor Marion Makarewicz.
Bishop Perry, in his homily, encouraged everyone to observe Holy Week by following Jesus into Jerusalem and remaining with him through his passion and death.
“These Holy Week ceremonies bring Jesus up close to us,” the bishop said, “where we can feel his breath, feel his touch, examine the wounds he received on our behalf and hopefully experience the exuberance of his resurrection that we hope to share with him one day.”
What followed Jesus’s resurrection was “an excitement and fervor that was unleashed on the world, that has come down to you and me to this day and makes a difference in how we live and how we choose and how we work and how we play and how we work out our salvation, because of who he is and what he did for us,” Bishop Perry stated.
Signs and wonders
The pilgrims, including seventh- and eighth-graders from Holy Rosary School in Monroe City, filled the pews and choir loft of the 1862-vintage Brush Creek church, one of five designated pilgrimage destinations in this diocese for the Jubilee Year of Hope.
Together, they prayed the prayer for Fr. Tolton’s canonization, written by Bishop Perry.
The bishop encouraged the people to pray for a miracle through Fr. Tolton’s intercession — “to ask God to grant us this gift, this statement that Fr. Tolton is in heaven, that God approves of this.
“Such that Tolton’s name can be pronounced at the altar and etched on our calendars, and Mass can be celebrated in his honor,” the bishop said.
By miracle, Bishop Perry specifically meant “an inexplicable turnaround in health that medicine cannot explain, that medicine has nothing to do with.”
“By inexplicable, we mean the doctors here and the doctors in Rome have to look at the facts of a person’s sudden turnaround in health, and they have to admit that we cannot explain it,” he said.
“Known only to God”
At the end of Mass, Bishop Perry led the people out to bless the new memorial in the slave section of the cemetery.
The inscription on the monument, paid for by a bequest from a family with long associations to the former St. Peter Parish, reads:
“Here lie human remains of souls known only to God. Enslaved in life, now free in life eternal.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Bishop Perry. “It’s lovely.”
The people then spent about an hour enjoying lunch, praying in church and exploring the chapel grounds and cemetery.
Three priests heard Confessions under large trees, the wind carrying the prayers of contrition to God’s ears.
Back in the chapel, the pilgrims heard a presentation about Servant of God Julia Greeley, another African-American candidate for sainthood who grew up about 10 miles from where Fr. Tolton was born.
Now buried in a marble tomb in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Denver, “Beloved Julia Greeley,” who died in 1919, is remembered as Denver’s Angel of Charity.
The pilgrims traveled by caravan to Fr. Tolton’s burial place in St. Peter Cemetery in Quincy, where people silently prayed and received a blessing from Bishop Perry.
They then made a visit to St. Francis Solanus Church in Quincy, where Franciscan brothers many decades ago helped Fr. Tolton prepare to enter the seminary.
A specially commissioned painting of Fr. Tolton was recently added to the church’s impressive collection of artwork.
Refreshments and fellowship convened in the parish hall until the pilgrims gradually parted company.
Amanda Durbin, a member of St. Mary Parish in Shelbina, who with her husband Dale developed Camp Tolton to bolster Catholic life for families and children, organized the pilgrimage.
They and Dean and Zanna Durbin purchased and refurbished the Camp Tolton Lodge in March 2024. Construction and improvements are ongoing.
She contacted Bishop Perry, who said he’d be happy to visit during Holy Week.
“I really feel in my heart that Fr. Tolton wanted today to happen,” said Mrs. Durbin. “And I think a miracle might come out of somebody in this crowd today.”
