Venerable Fr. Tolton's lesson about another terrible sickness
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Nothing remotely resembled social distancing aboard the disease-filled ships that carried slaves from the African coast to the Western Hemisphere.
What’s amazing is how many of the men and women — including Venerable Father Augustus Tolton’s ancestors — survived those weeks-long journeys of despair.
They arrived at a place where another insidious and even more deadly contagion had taken hold.
“Plagues and sicknesses come in many phases,” stated Bishop Joseph N. Perry, auxiliary bishop of Chicago and co-postulator of Venerable Fr. Tolton’s sainthood cause.
“Our country’s ambivalence about the morality and feasibility of slavery was a plague if not a sickness that gripped our nation for over 400 years,” he noted in an April 6 email to The Catholic Missourian.
Bishop Perry was answering a question about how Fr. Tolton’s life and ministry can enlighten the faithful during the current pandemic.
In the prayer Bishop Perry composed for Fr. Tolton’s sainthood cause, he acknowledges before God that “Fr. Tolton’s suffering service sheds light upon our sorrows; we see them through the prism of your Son’s passion and death.”
The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which allowed the Missouri territory to enter the Union as a slave state, helped prolong the sickness of slavery that had infected all of society.
“Augustus Tolton was born in the midst of that national illness and walked through it as a Christian,” Bishop Perry stated, “but not without grave personal suffering.”
That national sickness eventually claimed the lives of 600,000 men from both sides on the battlefields of this country “and many more uncounted off the battlefield,” he said.
Fr. Tolton was born into a family of slaves and baptized into the Catholic Church in northeastern Missouri a few years before the Civil War broke out.
He escaped as a child into Illinois with his mother and two siblings, while the war that would claim his father’s life was still raging.
Even after the war ended and slavery was abolished in this country, Fr. Tolton faced massive obstacles toward becoming the Church’s first recognizably black priest in the United States.
He prevailed with help from God, his family, local priests, School Sisters of Notre Dame, Franciscan friars in Quincy, Ill. and the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome.
Ordained in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in 1886, he was sent back to Quincy as a missionary to his own people.
He returned to Missouri several times to offer Mass and lead parish missions.
He was eventually reassigned to Chicago, where he ministered among some of the city’s poorest and most vulnerable individuals.
He died of a heatstroke at age 43 and is now under serious consideration for beatification and possibly an official declaration of sainthood by the Church.
“He chose God and the message of the Savior, Jesus Christ, to combat that terrible sickness and came off in the end with his faith, hope and love intact,” Bishop Perry insisted.
Nonetheless, “residuals of that national illness remain with us still.”
Even today, “some refuse the vaccine of the Gospel that stays the illness and ultimately cures it,” Bishop Perry stated.
