Roman Relations with: John Augustus Tolton (baptized Augustine; April 1, 1854 – July 9, 1897) was an African American who served as first Black Catholic priest in the United States, ordained in Rome in 1886.

According to a 1893 article in the Lewiston Daily Sun, "Father Tolton ... is a fluent and graceful talker and has a singing voice of exceptional sweetness, which shows to good advantage in the chants of the high mass.

[6] Savilla Elliott's classes, however, did not extend beyond memorisation of the Ten Commandments, which Martha Jane Chisley often prayed by reciting them aloud at deeply emotional and fearful moments, but without understanding their meaning.

[10] According to Joyce Duriga, "In 1859 -- five years after Augustus was born -- their respective owners gave Martha Jane and a man named Peter Paul permission to marry.

According to United States military records, he enlisted on September 20, 1863 in the 3rd Arkansas Infantry Regiment of Colored Troops at Hannibal, Missouri as "Peter Paul Lefevre", a nome de guerre derived from the surname of the priest who had baptized him.

[14][6][12] He was intending to fight in the Union Army during the American Civil War, but Peter died of dysentery on January 12, 1864 in a military hospital in Helena, Arkansas.

However, as the case of the 38 "Liberators" from the 9th Minnesota Infantry Regiment, whose November 1863 train robbery at Otterville, Missouri successfully rescued a runaway slave's wife and children from being sold out of the State demonstrates, Union soldiers, even at the risk of court-martial, routinely ignored these orders and defied them outright.

After Union soldiers in Hannibal provided Martha and her children with a rowboat, she successfully rowed her family one mile across the Mississippi River[18] and into the Free State of Illinois.

[12] Martha enrolled her son in a local segregated public school named after Abraham Lincoln, where Tolton was placed in a class with much younger children and is believed to have been bullied by the older students.

[6] After Charley's death at the age of ten,[6] Augustine met Peter McGirr, a Catholic priest from Fintona, County Tyrone who had grown up in a nearby Irish-American farming community.

[6][12] McGirr took Tolton under his wing and arranged for him to attend St. Lawrence's (later known as St. Peter's) Catholic School during the winter months when the tobacco factory was closed.

[6] In 1874, a 20-year old Tolton was recruited to assist two local German-American priests in an effort to found a tuition free Catholic school for the children of Quincy's Black community.

One of the Sisters wrote at the time, "The older pupils studied the Catechism so diligently that the Holy Sacraments could be administered to them -- surely the new school's sweetest and most beneficial fruit..."[22] Even though African-American Baptist and Methodist ministers objected after seven students were baptized into the Catholic Church during the first year and succeeded by 1880 in forcing the Diocese to close the school down,[23] Tolton always recalled this time in his life fondly.

[25] While still teaching his fellow African Americans at the Catholic school, Tolton gained admission into St. Francis Solanus College (now Quincy University),[26] which he attended from 1878-1880.

[1][12] Meanwhile, diocesan priests continue to tutor Tolton in Ecclesiastical Latin, Koine Greek, German, ancient and modern history, philosophy, and geography.

[30] In a letter to the Mill Hill Missionaries, a religious order founded by Cardinal Herbert Vaughan to minister to the Black population of the British Empire from their headquarters in Mill Hill, North London, Theodore Wegmann, the assistant pastor of St. Boniface Church in Quincy, wrote, "I make bold to apply to you on behalf of a young man of the African race, who is very desirous of becoming a missionary for the people of his race, and to whom I have been giving instruction for about a year and a half, having been requested by his Pastor, Reverend Peter McGirr of St. Peter's Church of this city.

[32] Refusing to give up, the Franciscans at St Francis Solanus College finally arranged for Tolton to study at the Pontifical Urban University in Rome.

[12] Expecting to serve as a missionary priest in the midst of the ongoing Scramble for Africa, Tolton had carefully studied his ancestral continent's regional cultures and languages.

"[38] This is why, when a newly ordained Tolton was redirected to return to the United States to serve as a Catholic missionary to the Black community, Cardinal Simeoni quipped, while, issuing the order in a document that still survives in the Vatican archives, "America has been called the most enlightened nation.

[40] He attempted to organize a parish there, but over the years, met with resistance from both White ethnic Catholics (many of whom were German-Americans) and, even more so, from African American Protestant ministers, who feared members of their congregations defecting to Catholicism.

[12] He organized St. Joseph Catholic Church and school in Quincy but ran into opposition from the new dean of the parish, who wanted white worshipers turned away from his Masses.

An 1893 article in the Lewiston Daily Sun, written while he worked to establish St. Monica's for African American Catholics in Chicago, said, "Father Tolton ... is a fluent and graceful talker and has a singing voice of exceptional sweetness, which shows to good advantage in the chants of the high mass.

Holy Family was then the largest English-speaking parish in Chicago, composed primarily of South Side Irish, who were also struggling to establish a home in the sometimes unwelcoming city.

[49] Daniel Rudd, who organized the initial Colored Catholic Congress in 1889, was quoted in the November 8, 1888, edition of The Irish Canadian as commenting about the Congress by saying: "For a long time the idea prevailed that the negro was not wanted beyond the altar rail, and for that reason, no doubt, hundreds of young colored men who would otherwise be officiating at the altar rail today have entered other walks.

On March 1, 2010, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago announced that he was beginning an official investigation into Tolton's life and virtues with a view to opening the cause for his canonization.

[12] Historical and theological commissions were established at this time to investigate his life, along with the Father Tolton Guild,[57] which is responsible for the promotion of his cause through spiritual and financial endeavors.

The dossier of research into Tolton's life went to the Vatican, where the documents collected to support his cause were analyzed, bound into a book called a "positio" or official position paper, evaluated by theologians, and then passed to the pope.

[12] Following procedures laid out in canon law, a forensic pathologist verified that the remains (which included a skull, femurs, ribs, vertebrae, pelvis, and portions of arm bones) belong to Tolton.