You can take the cardinal out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the cardinal.
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, a native Chicagoan, lauded the memory of Venerable Augustus Tolton, the first recognized African American priest in the United States, in remarks made prior to a Nov. 20 performance of “Tolton: From Slave to Priest,” in an auditorium on the campus of the Catholic University of America in Northeast Washington.
“Follow not the known path. Go to where there is no path, and blaze a trail,” Cardinal Gregory quoted Tolton in his address. In so doing, the cardinal added, “he blazed a trail of inspiration.”
“’Good Father Gus,’ as some called him, served in my native state of Illinois, and even in my home city of Chicago,” Cardinal Gregory noted.
Father Tolton, who was refused admission to every Catholic seminary in the United States, was educated for the priesthood in Rome, and first assigned to his adopted home town of Quincy, Ill., where 8-year-old Augustus and his family fled from slavery in neighboring Missouri.
After his ministry to Catholics of all races – and Black Protestants – in Quincy brought racial animus to a near-boil, Father Tolton asked to be reassigned to Chicago, which was home to 27,000 formerly enslaved Blacks, whose rural upbringing in servitude was ill-suited to a growing and bustling urban city.
It was there that he had planned to construct a church for Black Catholics, but could raise only enough money for the ground floor to be built before he died, having worked himself to exhaustion to minister to the many needs of his people.
Pope Francis declared Father Tolton venerable in 2019. As Father Tolton was an inspiration to the people of his day, Cardinal Gregory said, “may we be inspired in seeing his story brought to life.”
And so it was. “Tolton: From Slave to Priest” chronicles Father Tolton’s life from childhood, where he would be told to cut more switches for the slave master so he could continue to whip those he enslaved until he was too tired to continue.
The Tolton family, which was Catholic, relied on God’s power to make a successful escape from the Missouri plantation. Augustus, who was bright but had never learned to read or write on the plantation, was mocked at both a Catholic school and the “colored” school in Quincy for this.
A second parish in Quincy admitted young Augustus, who could only attend school during the winter months as he had to earn money for the fatherless household by working at a tobacco factory during growing season.
The play, which also recounts Father Tolton’s growth in faith and holiness, is assisted considerably by filmed backdrops from the plantation to splendors of Rome, with actor Jim Coleman, who portrays Father Tolton at all ages and stages of his life, interacting with characters on the screen, among them his mother, two priests, parishioners and friends, and a Roman cardinal. But throughout, there is a hooded skeleton doing his best to impart doubt and fear into the priest.
A clear majority of the audience gave Coleman’s performance a standing ovation. Coleman thanked the crowd profusely, and quoted one of his favorite lines from the show, about loving your enemies: “We will ask God to turn their hearts. If that doesn’t work, we will ask God to turn their ankles, so that we will know them by their limping.”
Coleman is not one to rest on his laurels – literally. He and his stage manager had to strike the set pronto because “we’ve got to be at a school in Maryland at seven o’clock in the morning.”
