Chicago Studies Fall 2023/Winter 2024

Chicago Studies

Melanie Barrett

Editorial Board

Maria Barga Emery de Gaál

Lawrence Hennessey Paul Hilliard John Lodge

Brendan Lupton

Kevin Magas David Mowry

Anthony Muraya Patricia Pintado-Murphy

Juliana Vazquez Ray Webb

Founding Editor

George Dyer

CHICAGO STUDIES is edited by members of the faculty of the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary for the continuing theological development of priests, deacons, and lay ecclesial ministers. The journal welcomes articles likely to be of interest to our readers. Views expressed in the articles are those of the respective authors and not necessarily those of the editorial board. All communications regarding articles and editorial policy should be addressed to cseditor@usml.edu CHICAGO STUDIES is indexed in the ATLA Religion Database

Cover Design by Deacon Thomas Gaida

Copyright © 2025 Civitas Dei Foundation

ISSN 0009-3718

Building a Church of Hope & Promise

Editor’s Corner Volume 62.1, Fall 2023/Winter 2024

By Dr. Juliana V. Vazquez, Ph.D.

People of faith believe that the superabundant presence of grace in our lives never allows us to remain static; if we are truly living a life of grace, then we are always learning, changing, growing in virtue and in faith, hope, and love. The intrinsically dynamic nature of grace explains why theology the great science of grace often can be bolstered by and written in the form of stories of encounter: narratives that celebrate conversions in character and in community. In the current issue of Chicago Studies, we feature snapshots from two different movements of grace in the Church: the renewed interest in social justice and thus in humane immigration reform, and the renewed interest in the life and times of Fr. Augustus Tolton (1854-1897), the first African American priest in the United States.

This issue features the 2023 Albert Cardinal Meyer Lecturer, Reverend Monsignor Milam Joseph, priest of the Diocese of Dallas and president emeritus of the University of Dallas. Msgr. Joseph’s two lectures, delivered in 2023 at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, have been combined and synthesized into the first article, which recounts his ministry in Tyler, Texas. Msgr. Joseph contributed to the famous 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe, which ruled in favor of the rights of undocumented children to a public education. But that’s not the beginning of the story; Msgr. Joseph insists that it was his background as the grandson of working-class, Lebanese immigrants that first taught him the value of family, hard work, and the sacramental character of all genuine love. Alongside his article, we have included photos that he shared from various moments of his history his father’s small hat shop, his first meeting with his Great Aunt Selma, a letter from Judge William Wayne Justice, and others all of which speak to the pervasive power of God’s love to deliver justice and hope.

Directly following the Monsignor’s contribution come those of the two respondents, Bishop Mark Seitz and Fr. Raymond Webb. Most Reverend Mark Seitz, Bishop of the Diocese of El Paso, reminds us that to deny recognition of the dignity of immigrants and others in need is to dehumanize all of us, whereas to serve others is to build up the household of God. Reverend Raymond Webb, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Pastoral Theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, gives several first-hand accounts of the dangers that he has witnessed immigrants face in their search for better lives; he describes the scope and urgency of the problem; and he suggests several courses of action.

In the other main feature of the issue, the Most Reverend Joseph N. Perry, Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of Chicago and diocesan postulator for the canonization cause of Fr. Augustus Tolton, provides a biographical sketch of the Venerable Tolton against the backdrop of a country ravaged by racism, the horror of the Civil War, and the difficulties of Reconstruction. He paints the compellingly beautiful nobility of spirit, perseverance of soul, and steadfastness of faith that Venerable Tolton displayed in the face of rampant discrimination, even from within his own local church communities. In his appreciative and creative response, Dr. Paul G. Monson, Associate Professor of Church History at Sacred Heart Seminary & School of Theology (Wisconsin), invites us to consider the educational and priestly formation that Fr. Tolton received in Rome as equipping him to minister in his native country as in a mission field, where his battles were countless, and his “failures” seemingly never-ending, yet his unfailing dedication to the Church provides a unique and radiant example of the promise and hope of Christ.

An Immigrant Church: Stories of Encounter

Authored by Rev. Msgr. Milam J. Joseph

Edited by Kathleen Burk, Ph.D.

I want to tell you a story of my development from the son of working-class Lebanese immigrants, through my early life as a pastor, leading a pilgrim church on earth through a stressful time of growth and renewal that made national headlines and reflected the historic changes in the church, the nation, and the world at that time. I will focus on two transformational moments in my life and two times the Holy Spirit spoke through me. I know it was the Spirit because I spontaneously said things I would not ordinarily say. I’ll conclude with some reflections from six decades of priestly life for today’s seminarians.

My grandfather was born in the village of Rachine in what is now known as Northern Lebanon. As a young man he married Catherine Sassin and saved enough money to come to the United States alone, planning to earn enough money to send for Catherine, who was pregnant. She eventually joined him, but the baby, Selma, remained in Rachine. My father, John Joseph, was born in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, in 1905.

My mother, Anne Marpes, on the other hand, was born in Rachine in 1911 and immigrated with her parents when she was six months old. They were certainly not in first class on the boat. Mother and baby both got so sick a fellow passenger had to nurse baby Anne. She grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, really understanding what it meant to be poor. Her parents lived in a little tenement house. She went to Epiphany School for grade school, but never went to high school.

My daddy had six years of education. When his mother died, his father moved to Greenville, in East Texas, where some of his extended family had settled. He remarried a distant cousin there and had two more kids. A sign in the downtown area read: “We Have the Blackest Dirt and the Whitest People.” If you were black, you’d better be out by sundown. I would remember that sign very well when I returned to East Texas as an adult.

When my daddy was fourteen years old the family moved to Dallas, where he began shining shoes. At twenty, he started a business, The Hatatorium, and life became different. 1 Six years later, on a visit to Pittsburg, he met Anne, who was then twenty-one years old. They married and began their life together in Dallas, which, like Greenville, was not very hospitable to foreigners: Syrians, Greeks, Catholics, and the like. My mother shaped the way I understood the immigrant issue. After her death, I found a letter she kept that was written by an Ursuline nun who was Director of Missions, Mother Marcella Difani, OSU. This was in 1945, and I was born in 1937, so what was I? Eight years old? Second grade at Sacred Heart School. So, she wrote this letter:

Dear Milam Joseph,

You are a wonderful boy to sacrifice your money to bring a little heathen to the Lord through Holy Baptism. It is only in Heaven that you will understand, Milam Joseph, what a marvelous act it is to ransom these poor, abandoned Babies in the far-away mission lands. You can be very, very sure that your sacrifices are most pleasing to Our Lord and His Blessed Mother. In the name of our Blessed Ursuline Missions, I say a HEARTY THANK YOU! 2

Remember those days? Those pictures, those babies?

Now let me tell you what’s important about this letter. It’s not the theology. It’s that my mom and dad gave me the five dollars to buy “the pagan baby” (as they were referred to back then). Five dollars in 1945 was a lot of money. And when they put up five dollars for me to buy “the pagan baby,” they were affirming that taking care of migrants and pagans and babies and foreigners was OK.

And that was a transforming event for me. I kept the letter.

After I was ordained, a friend and I visited the Holy Land, Egypt, and Lebanon in 1966. In Rachine I met the Maronite Rite priest who baptized my mother and his son, also a priest, who told me that he had sent for Selma, the aunt I had never met, who was left behind as an infant when my grandparents immigrated to Pittsburgh. She was eighty-nine years old. She came up to me and everybody in the courtyard got quiet. And she came up to about here on me. She had a blue polka dot dress on. She had the wrinkles in her face of eighty-nine years in Syria. Recall the Ottoman Turks, all that sort of thing that had been going on for decades. She said in Arabic and I wish I could say it in Arabic she said, “When I see you, and hug you, and smell you and kiss you, I am seeing and hugging and smelling and kissing my mother and my father and my brothers and my sisters.” As I would later understand, encountering me was sacramental; I made her long-lost parents and siblings present to her in a physical way. 3

When I returned to East Texas in 1969 it was still a very prejudiced place. I was assigned to Immaculate Conception Parish in Tyler, a small town of about 60,000 people. It wasn’t unusual to be among a group of people described as “some Christians and some Catholics.” The locals didn’t consider Catholics to be Christians. The black laborers that had long tended the city’s famous rose fields had moved on. Now the fields were full of Hispanic migrants, mostly Mexicans. I was sent there because of some issues that had come up in Dallas. Some priests who were not into Vatican II said, “We need to send this young Notre Dame graduate to Tyler for an attitude adjustment.” Well, it turned out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me in my priesthood. I was there twenty-five years: twenty-two years as a pastor, and the rest as a school principal, building and saving the school system. In Tyler I was able to advance in ecumenism, in liturgy, and in all the aspects of Catholic teaching, especially The Church in the Modern World, which states that social justice constitutes an integral part of the gospel. 4 I learned that you can’t be preaching the gospel without preaching social justice, as Cardinal Meyer 5 talked about. How do we, as Catholics, enter into this world and be a catalyst for preparing for the future of God’s pervasive creation in His love?

Sometime later I was in the basement of the church teaching an RCIA class of Catholics and non-Catholics. I got to John 14:8-9, where Phillip says, “Lord, show us the Father.” And Jesus answers, “Do you not know that when you see me, you see the Father?”

And it just dawned on me like a shock: that’s really what it’s all about. When you see the immigrant, and when you see the poor, and when you see the needy, you are seeing the Christ in your midst.

That was a transformative event in my life because I began to look at the church that way. I began to look at social justice that way. I began to look at relationships that way. It’s not heaven up and hell down anymore; it’s relationship. The Church in the Modern World says God reveals himself in Jesus Christ and in creation. Not that I wasn’t empathetic towards things, but after that time things became sacraments with a small “s,” like the meaning of my Great Aunt Selma’s embrace: When I see you, I see the Christ.

During my time in Tyler, I experienced two moments of instantaneous response that I understood to be the Holy Spirit speaking through me. The first occurred early on, when I was thirty-one years old and principal of the Catholic school there. A parent came to my office and demanded that his daughter, a middle school student, be taught science by the high school physics and chemistry teacher. I said, “We’re happy to have the middle school teacher. He has two degrees, he’s an outstanding teacher. Why do you want your daughter taught by another teacher?” And he said in no uncertain terms: “I don’t want my daughter taught by an N-word,” only he didn’t say “N-word.”

I was just shocked, but I instantly replied, “Where do you want me to send your tuition?” Then he looked at me and said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Well, your daughter is no longer registered in this school. You are not happy with us. And we are not happy with you.” That was a hard thing to do because I’m Lebanese, and Lebanese don’t give money back. That is not our style, OK? We just don’t do that.

Then, in 1976, with the development and growth of the Hispanic community, I went down to the Mexican American Community Center in San Antonio to learn Spanish. I roomed with a guy who was a truck driver. I learned a lot about Peterbilt trucks, but I didn’t learn much Spanish. After six weeks or so, I came back to Tyler and, though I didn’t know the language, I began to say Mass in Spanish, and people would translate my homilies as I was giving them.

I said: “We gotta do this in this parish. We gotta open a Mexican community office.” I opened the Mexican American Community Center of Immaculate Conception Church to begin doing immigration work. I hired Mike Andrews, the only guy who applied, to be its director. He was a little quirky and was from New Jersey, of all places, but bilingual, with a Hispanic adopted son. They were flocking to him. There was now a 2:00 p.m. Spanish Mass at Immaculate Conception. When it came time to count the collection, we always knew which bags were from the Spanish Mass because they were all coins. The people on the Tyler School Board could also see that the Hispanic community was growing.

Then, in 1977, the Tyler Independent School District (TISD) decided that they would no longer provide free education to children who could not provide documentation of their citizenship. They wanted to charge them $1,000/year tuition, when the average income for the Hispanic families was about $4,000-$5,000/year.

Mike called me. I was visiting my mother. He said, “You know, these families are coming to see me about what they can do about that situation.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Well, we can’t change the TISD’s mindset. They’re gonna charge them $1,000 a year tuition, and they obviously can’t afford it.” He said, “What should we do?”

Immediately I said, “You tell them that we will get them proper legal counsel.” Where did those exact words “proper legal counsel” come from? That was the Spirit.

So, he and another attorney by the name of Larry Davis met with me, and we called the Mexican American Defense League in San Francisco. Two days later they got off the plane. They came to my office and interviewed four families. And they marched down to the Federal District

Court of Judge William Wayne Justice, a Democrat appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson, and filed a lawsuit.

Judge Justice was a firebrand liberal who had done things for social justice that were rather remarkable. He ordered the Texas Department of Corrections to address the inhumane living conditions in the prisons. He had already ordered the Tyler school system to integrate the schools, which they had resisted for fifteen years after Brown v. Board. When he insisted that they integrate that year, they closed the black school. In September, 1977, when they pleaded their decision to charge tuition fees to noncitizens, he handed down an injunction that said it violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that no state shall deprive any person doesn’t say black, white, brown, doesn’t say Hispanic or alien, doesn’t say documented, not documented any person, legal or illegal, any person of liberty or property within the due process of the law, nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. 6

In 1980, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld Judge Justice’s ruling, then in February of 1982, the Supreme Court of the United States, affirmed Plyler v. Doe in a 5-4 decision. 7 It had taken five years. There were live shots and news cameras first time I’ve ever been on TV. Tim O’Brien, a well-known broadcast news legal analyst, approached me and asked: “Well, what do you think of this? The families won’t talk to us. What do you think of it? You’re the pastor of the parish.”

I said, “Well, Tim, I’ll tell you what I think about it, and I’ve been saying it for five years, every time it’s come up: We weren’t out there for publicity. It wasn’t, you know, Monsignor Joseph is doing all. There wasn’t any of that, thank God. The community the Tyler Independent School District is saying we want your bodies, and we want your labor, but we don’t want your families and we don’t want to educate your kids.” He replied, “Would you say that on TV?” I answered, “Sure. I’ve been saying it.” So, we got it on camera. I got a few nasty letters, but it changed the mindset of the people in the community. It changed my mindset. And I hope that when I die and I will die they will put this on my tombstone:

Monsignor Milam J. Joseph, A Liberal Minded Man, Open to the Totality of the Word That Is Embodied in Human Life

This was one of the issues that always made me feel good, and there were a lot that made me feel good. And a lot that didn’t.

In 1991, before he died, William Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography was published. 8 In it he considers the case of education for undocumented children to be one of the most important cases of his whole career. This is what he wrote in the copy of the book he gave to me:

My cordial and respectful regards to my valued friend, Monsignor Milam Joseph, who has contributed spiritual enrichment to the members of his denomination, and inspirational, enlightened, and pragmatic leadership in the cause of social justice, to the infinite benefit of both persons of his faith and countless others. 9

Let me tell you something: I need to read that every night. When things are bad, I like to read that. The last thing I want to say is to the seminarians: you must just trust your experience. It is limited at this point, but it’s all you really have. And it’s got to be a reflective experience. I’ve

been a priest now for fifty-nine years, and I can honestly tell you it has not been the same experience repeated fifty-nine times.

When people would ask me where I went to the seminary, I would say Howard Cleaners and Laundry at 4842 Gaston Ave. I had a sense of responsibility and ownership that came from my daddy, who owned his own business. Howard Cleaners and Laundry was all service. Customer comes in, you serve her like she’s the only customer in the world. When that customer walks in with those dirty clothes, that’s your money in the bank, your life on the line, your responsibility. It’s not about being served; it’s about serving. It’s hospitality. Welcoming the stranger.

My mother and daddy used to go to 6:00 am Mass every morning in Lent. Then they would go down to Waffle House, have a waffle, then go open the dry-cleaning shop at 7:00 am. Not 7:01 or 7:02 or 7:03. It was seven o’clock. You gotta get those dirty clothes in there because your life depends on cleaning those clothes.

One Easter time when I was home from theological studies as a seminarian, my daddy and I were in the car. I said:

“Well, how did things go during Lent?”

“Well, it went all right.”

He didn’t say a lot. And I said:

“Who said Mass?”

“I don’t know. Some new guy.”

And I saw it.

“Was it alright?”

Then he said the guy was fine the first week, and then the second week it was 6:05, and then the next week it was 6:10, and then the next week it was 6:15. He looked at me and said:

“If that guy was in business, he’d starve to death.”

Show up. People will forgive you for everything you have ever done, whatever it may be, but they will never forgive you for not being there when somebody died. That is all part of a reflective experience, and it continues to happen today for me and for you and for all of us.

All through my twenty-five years as a pastor in Tyler, the Bishop used to send new guys to me for some reason or another. Maybe they needed an attitude adjustment like I did, I don’t know. Invariably they would all come, and we would talk about homilies. They would get up to give a homily and you know, I can see it they’d bring up a binder, probably red because, you know, the church likes red. And they would open the binder, and they would read their homily. The minute you start reading a homily, the people out there turn you off. They’re not interested in what you’ve written. They’re interested in what went on in your heart when you wrote it.

After about a month or two of that, I would say to them, look like Jesus I got something to say to you, Simon. You have got to at some point in time drop the script. You’ve got to tell people what’s going on in your gut. You’ve got to let them know what’s going on in your heart. For many of them it was OK. They did a good job with that, but some couldn’t do it. I don’t know why some didn’t, but they were fixated on perfection. They wanted it to be perfect. And I’ve got news for you. There ain’t nothing perfect in this world.

Some—not all seminarians are on a career path; they envision being a bishop someday. There is nothing wrong with being a bishop. Being a bishop is a good thing, but the desire to be a bishop will kill you beca

use you start making decisions out of what you desire: “What would be good for my career?” instead of “What’s really going on in the minds and the hearts of the sheep of the people?”

That is what happened to me in Tyler.

I was able to do in Tyler what no other minister of religion would touch, because I was a priest. I was free to enhance the power of the word of God. I had a mentality that said: be present; lay down your life. I didn’t have to rely on saying the right thing, so a group of people in the parish would hire me for another term. I was president of the Ministerial Alliance. When I took the issues of immigration and education to them, no one would get involved. Not one. Not because they were not good guys some were a lot smarter than I was but because their job depended on saying the right thing in the pulpit. We need to say the right thing in the pulpit, but the right thing is the word of God, and it cuts both ways.

So, I would just challenge you to be owners of your lives, so that when you go into a place, you take responsibility. Reflect on your experience. It will not come to you all at one time, but keep thinking, which is to say, keep praying, and keep smelling like sheep.

The prolific writer and retreat master Ed Hays was asked what he would do when he retired.

He said, “Well, you practice dying.”

I thought that was weird.

The interviewer said, “Well, how do you do that?”

Ed said, “Well, I’m in my home and I get a flower every week, and I put the flower in the middle of the table where I say my prayers, and the flower grows and blooms and opens up, and then one day I come in and all the leaves have fallen off. And that’s what I do.”

So, we’re blooming like crazy, but at some point, in time, our leaves are going to fall off.

And it is in that context that we will be in the arms of the pervasiveness of God’s love, grace, mercy, and compassion, and we will realize—we will experience, maybe for the first time who we are. What we are. And that nothing separates us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This article comes directly from a transcription of the 2023 Albert Cardinal Meyer Lectures at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, given by Msgr. Joseph Milam on March 9th and March 10th of 2023 in Mundelein, Illinois. Msgr. Joseph Milam is a priest of the Diocese of Dallas. The editorial board of Chicago Studies would like to extend special thanks to Dr. Kathleen Burk for her fine work synthesizing the original material from the transcription of Monsignor’s address into its current form

1 Figure 1a. and Figure 1b. both depict the same scene from the Hatatorium circa 1925-1930. Figure 1a. shows the original placement of the photo with accompanying information. Figure 1b. has been digitized for clarity.

2 Figure 2 is a photo of the original letter, written in 1945.

3 Figure 3 is a photo of Monsignor Milam’s Great Aunt Selma embracing him when they met in 1966 in Rachine, a town in Northern Lebanon.

4https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html

5 Albert Gregory Meyer (March 9, 1903-April 9, 1965) was an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago in Illinois from 1958 until his death in 1965 and was appointed a cardinal in 1959. He previously served as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee in Wisconsin from

1953 to 1958 and as bishop of the Diocese of Superior in Wisconsin from 1946 to 1953. Cardinal Meyer was a strong advocate for racial justice and a firm supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was also a voice for religious tolerance and for the reconciliation of the Catholic Church with the Jewish people.

6 U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1.

7 See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/202/ Also see Figure 4, a photo of an editorial summarizing the significance of the case. The original source is “Educating Immigrants: Anniversary of Wise Court Ruling Worth Celebrating,” editorial, Dallas Morning News, June 12, 2017.

8 Frank R Kemerer, William Wayne Justice: A Judicial Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).

9 Figure 5 shows a photo of the note written by Judge William Wayne Justice to Msgr. Milam, dated November 18, 1991.

Plyler v. Doe and the Dignity of Personhood: A Response to Msgr. Milam Joseph

By Most Rev Mark J. Seitz, D.D.

Thank you for the kind introduction and greetings to all. I’m very grateful for the invitation to respond to someone I admire very much, Msgr. Milam Joseph. In a sense, one is always responding to someone like Msgr. Joseph, who even after almost sixty years of priestly ministry continues to make a contribution. He continues to set the bar very high for us young priests and young bishops.

It’s important to reflect and reminisce over historical events like Plyler v. Doe. Msgr. Joseph’s contribution to the events is a tribute to him, as a person and as a pastor. But I think it is also a tribute to the Catholic Church in the United States and to priests throughout our country.

The church in this country has long been on the side of the immigrant. And it’s a story that we don’t tell often enough. In that sense Plyler v. Doe is also a tribute to all of those unsung heroes the parish priests who, like Msgr. Joseph, have done and still do so much for our migrant communities. I’m glad we have the opportunity to tell this story in this forum, with those preparing for ministry, who need to see credible examples of priestly service.

Let me say a few words about Plyler v. Doe and why its legacy is important today.

If you read the majority opinion, one very obvious thing is the repeated reference to persons. The word person is used about seventy times. That’s heartening, because Plyler v. Doe affirmed the personhood of immigrant children, which was the predicate for the recognition of their constitutional and civil rights.

But this is also somewhat astonishing, even though we’re talking about events that took place more than forty years ago. It’s astonishing to think that it was in a country like ours so enriched by and dependent on the contributions of migrants that their very personhood was put into question. This is just what happened when the State of Texas took the decision to charge families a stiff fee for entrance into public education.

For many migrants, especially farmworkers and service workers who work extraordinarily hard to put food on our plates, the fee amounted to effective expulsion of their children from society. Some of our Catholic schools stepped up to the plate to assist the families left behind by this policy, very much in the image of the field hospital that Pope Francis has put forward as a model for the church today.

Expulsion was precisely the desired effect. The claim that immigrants were not subject to the jurisdiction of the State of Texas was in fact an open denial and disavowal of their personhood the message that you don’t belong. It was a dehumanizing policy, a modern-day retelling of God’s dialogue with Cain in Genesis 4:9: “ ‘Cain, where is your brother Abel?’ He answered, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’ ”

It is encouraging that the Supreme Court understood that the remedy to this injustice needed to be the unequivocal affirmation of the personhood of those affected by this policy. It’s on this foundation, too, that the church recognizes the human right to migrate.

Although we’ve traveled forty years, I’m not so certain the progress we made is so abiding. In Texas, the powers that be talk openly of wanting to revisit Plyler v. Doe. In addition, crass state adventurism like Operation Lone Star, which has placed Texas National Guardsmen on our already highly militarized border, is more an exercise in policing the boundaries of who is and is not worthy to be treated like a human being than it is an exercise in patrolling the national frontier.

Throughout the country, through our policies and practices, we continue to put in parentheses the personhood and human dignity of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, victims of human trafficking, and farmworkers. Our eyes were opened again just recently to the exploitation of migrant children in the bottom rungs of our economy and our supply chains, by companies turning a blind eye to migrant child labor This is personhood denied, too. And not only immigrants, but also the unborn, prisoners and convicts, and the poor are routinely denied recognition.

In Fratelli Tutti, the Holy Father identifies the core moral challenge of our day as removing the obstacles and borders to the recognition and the full inclusion of all in society. We are our brother’s keeper. Regarding immigrants, he remarks:

Migrants are not seen as entitled like others to participate in the life of society, and it is forgotten that they possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person. … No one will ever openly deny that they are human beings, yet in practice, by our decisions and the way we treat them, we can show that we consider them less worthy, less important, less human (§39).

And regarding the call to human fraternity, he comments:

It is my desire that, in this our time, by acknowledging the dignity of each human person, we can contribute to the rebirth of a universal aspiration to fraternity We need a community that supports and helps us, in which we can help one another to keep looking ahead. … Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all (§8)

We should never tire of telling and retelling stories like we’ve heard today, reflecting on the events that led to Plyler v. Doe, because in that retelling, we affirm that the struggle for justice is the struggle for the recognition of personhood and of human dignity. This sharing reinvigorates us spiritually.

Remember that the story of Plyler v. Doe began in the hall of a parish church, when parents got up the courage to tell their stories. It ended with a victory at the Supreme Court. My hope is that forty years from now, at another Cardinal Meyer Lecture, we’ll be reflecting on and celebrating the work of the church and the recognition by our society of the full dignity of Dreamers, of the eleven million without documents who are part of our neighborhoods, parishes, and cities, and of the ability of the refugee and asylum seeker to find refreshment and peace at our borders.

Let me conclude with a brief word on why it’s fitting that Msgr. Milam Joseph played a role in this story.

Priesthood is an imaging and a sharing in the priesthood of Jesus Christ, who in his life and death showed us what priestly service really is: laying down one’s life on account of love. That sacrifice ennobled and dignified our humanity beyond measure, bringing us into the household and fellowship of God. The building up of that household now, by affirming the humanity of every person, even in the face of dehumanization, is an eminently priestly duty.

My thanks again to Msgr. Joseph, and to all of you.

Plyler v. Doe and Humane Immigration Reform: A Response to Msgr. Milam Joseph

By Rev. Raymond J. Webb, S.T.L., Ph.D.

Good morning. I am grateful to Monsignor Milam Joseph and Bishop Mark Seitz for their presentations during this Meyer Lecture, for their significant contributions to the well-being of immigrants in the United States, and for their alerting us to the current situations of persons trying to seek asylum in the US.

My Background

My own experience, more recently, has been with asylum seekers who are fleeing violence which has touched their families and the places where they live. They are mostly from Mexico, with others from Haiti, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, and, in the past, El Salvador. I have briefly visited the shelter and asylum-seeker services provided by the Diocese of El Paso as well as Annunciation House in El Paso. The past two years have been focused primarily on the Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico, and in Arizona. Sponsored by the Western United States Province of Jesuits and the Mexican Missionaries of the Eucharist, together with the Diocese of Tucson and the Diocese of Nogales, Sonora, Kino provides some shelter as well as food, legal information, health care, and psychological services to persons seeking asylum in the United States There are also many agencies and perhaps thousands of volunteers providing necessary assistance to migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the United States and in other countries.

The Scope of the Problem

Of the eight billion people who populate the world today, it is estimated that more than one billion have been “on the move.” About 281 million people, 3.6% of the world’s population, do not live in the countries of their birth. About six million people have fled Ukraine, six million Venezuela, twelve million from the countries of Africa, many from the violence in Mexico. 1

Terms

Let us clarify some terms These remarks focus on migrants who are also refugees or asylum seekers. An external migrant is a person moving to another country. Some migrate to improve their economic situations or to join family members in the destination country. A refugee is someone forced to flee his own country because of persecution, war, or violence, who is living in another country and who seeks refuge in the United States. An asylum seeker is someone who has entered another country, in this case the United States, seeking to live here legally because of provable violence or persecution in their own country. They are to be recognized as refugees and have specific rights. One can seek asylum in the US if he or she has suffered or fear they will suffer persecution based on at least one of five grounds: race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. 2

Conditions Producing the Need for Asylum

What causes people to seek asylum? People are menaced by groups referred to as mafia or gangs or pandillas. One can argue that these lawless systems exist in a general atmosphere of corruption at all levels. These corrupt empires of drugs, guns, and extortion threaten people with death if they do not affiliate with these expanding illegal networks. In situations where income inequality leaves a huge gap between rich and poor, the lure of ill-gotten easy money and control is tempting for some. Of course, this is no excuse for criminal behavior. If one moves toward the higher end of the income scale there is the opportunity to live in a safer, more secure neighborhood, with less motivation to emigrate and more hope for the future.

Photographs as Weapons

A few weeks ago, I was very slowly riding down Luis Donaldo Colosio Blvd. in Nogales, Sonora, in the long line to reach the US Border to enter the country. (The street was named for the leading presidential candidate in an election twenty years ago. The candidate was assassinated.) Two young men of about twenty years of age, carrying thin backpacks, were walking and joking in the direction away from the border. Our car very slowly moved ahead a little bit. But as I looked out the other side of the car, I saw the same young men walking along toward the border. And then a single person came in the opposite direction. They stopped and talked with him for a few minutes. Then everyone continued on in their own directions, except that one of the two young men turned around and took a picture of the person they had just been talking with.

I had heard of this picture-taking before from an asylum seeker who was staying at the Kino Border Initiative. Juan fled his hometown in the middle of the night with his wife and baby daughter. He had been threatened for refusing to spy on a rival political party, which he had left. Two of his cousins had been killed. For safety’s sake, the young family had cut off all contact with their hometown, but the mafia network could find them again and possibly send a photo to those who might attempt to kill them As Juan waited in Nogales, Sonora, for an opportunity to apply for asylum in the United States, he had been photographed on the street by two people who wanted him to join their gang and tried to kidnap his young daughter. That’s part of how the mafia works, as it is a network of fear. Fortunately, after waiting since July, the young family had been permitted to cross the border and petition for asylum in the United States in early January. In the future, they will have a hearing before a judge or other immigration official about their petition In the meantime, they are with relatives in the United States, and recently they sent me, with great joy, pictures from the baptism of their baby.

United States Processes for Asylum Seekers

Asylum seeking, although an internationally recognized human right, is made difficult by the United States. You must be physically present in the territory of the United States to ask for asylum. Gates and fences and border guards try to prevent persons from being on US soil. Title 42 of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), instituted as part of the U.S. response to COVID-19, is an order saying that persons coming from countries where there is disease can be immediately expelled. This has been used to prevent persons coming from Mexico entering the United States to seek asylum, even though the health threat is no longer relevant. Its recent use has been political Beginning January 18, 2023, the CBP One electronic form (including pictures) must be used to

request an appointment to present one’s petition for asylum to the US Customs and Border Protection agent at the border. The website opens at 7:00 a.m. each day. (The technicalities and rules for the forms are changed at times in attempts to make them easier to fill out and submit.)

Generally, the site closes in two minutes. At Nogales there are only forty openings for submitting one’s petition to be able to speak with authorities at the border. A family of four takes four of those forty openings. People report that it is impossible to get an opening if you have four people in your group I watched early one morning as a group of people attempted to have the electronically complex form ready for the 7:00 a.m. opening of the filing portal. The daily preparation process can take four hours. That Sunday, no one gained an appointment to submit their application to the US Customs and Border Protection authorities. As of January 20, 2025, the CBP One process has been halted by the new administration.

The Issue of Quotas

We should be aware that quotas established by the President and the Congress are not filled. There is no limit on the number of asylum seekers who may be admitted to the United States. In 2019, more than 46,000 were admitted. In 2021, the revised quota for refugees and migrants was 62,500. 11,454 refugees plus 17,692 asylum seekers were admitted, well under the total allowed for all three groups. 3 The gap between the United States’ capacity to accept migrants and the actual number of admitted persons is at odds with the current United States labor shortage of five to ten million workers 4 We are apparently in an anti-immigrant mode as we have been at various times in our history, even though we are said to be a “nation of immigrants.”

It is said that when Title 42 expires in the spring of 2023, the Biden administration will put in a much more stringent process, which also bars persons who have previously attempted to enter the United States other than through a formal port of entry, or who have failed to seek asylum in any other country they have visited.

Foundational Principles

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the United Nations is relevant. Article 13.2 states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” Article 14.1 states: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution ” 5 Kieran Oberman argues that immigration is a human right. 6 There are certain conditions, of course, but basically it is a human right. He does not contend that immigration has been made into a legal right.

Christian ethics highlights distributive justice. As St. Augustine wrote in his Exposition of the Psalms 147, “The superfluities of the rich are the necessities of the poor. When you possess superfluities, you possess what belongs to others.” 7 We can find ways to assist asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants in addition to other persons needing assistance.

As Matthew 25:40 reminds us, “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”

Suggestions for Action

In summary, I suggest the following courses of action:

1. Be informed by authentic sources.

2. Assist asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants with your help, volunteering when possible.

3. Advocate with elected officials for humane immigration reform.

4. Can we build a Church of limitless hospitality and encounter? Can we see asylum seekers as our brothers and sisters who are not charity cases but persons possessed of equal though perhaps different gifts?

1 International Organization for Migration, World Migration Report 2022, edited by M. McAuliffe and A. Triandafyllidou (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2021)

2 Dan Restrepo, Joel Martinez, and Trevor Sutton, “Getting Migration in the Americas Right: A National Interest-Driven Approach,” Center for American Progress (June 2019): 6.

3 Office of Immigration Statistics, The 2021 Refugee and Asylees Annual Flow Report, edited by Ryan Baugh (Washington, DC: US Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics, 2022), 1. Also see Report to Congress on Proposed Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year 2021 at https://www.state.gov/wpcontent/uploads/2020/10/FY21-USRAP-Report-to-Congress-FINAL-for-WEBSITE-102220-508.pdf

4 See the November 2024 Job Openings and Labor Turnover report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for a recent statistic, which can be found at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/jolts_01072025.pdf

5 UN General Assembly, Resolution 217A (III), Universal Declaration of Human Rights, A/RES/217(III) (December 10, 1948), https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

6 Kieran Oberman, “Immigration as a Human Right,” in Sarah Fine and Lea Ypi, eds., Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 32-56.

7 Augustine, in Charles Avila, Ownership: Early Christian Teaching (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983)

Fr. Augustus Tolton (1854-1897): A Sign of Hope and Promise

By Bishop Joseph N. Perry, J.C.L., D.D.

Slaves of the southern states were always looking toward the North. North was a synonymous term for “freedom.” If possible, the rush was to get to the North, even as far as Canada. It was registered in the consciousness of blacks by rumor and report that, somehow, blacks were treated with some humanity in points north. Till very recent times, this impression has remained true.

At the outbreak of this nation’s Civil War, the escape of Martha Jane and her children from their slave owners was remarkable. To check the bleeding of the black workforce from the southern states, bounty hunters and other ne’er-do-wells were on the lookout for escaped slaves, rewarded handsomely for their capture of runaways. Upon return to their owners, slaves often were treated brutally.

Still today, one can visit Brush Creek, Missouri, the northeast corner of the state, to find the farm where the Toltons labored, a farm that is increasingly visited by tour groups and individuals. A little rebuilt church is there. In that church, with permission from their owners, Martha Jane Chisley and Peter Paul were married in 1859, and Augustus was baptized. Two cemeteries surround the church; on one side, there is a cemetery for white citizens with handsome grave markers, and on the other side, there is a series of unmarked, unnamed graves of slaves. The area remains pristine, as it was more than a hundred years ago, with farmers still farming and no modern roads or signage. One feels a bit unsteady driving deep into the rural area, even asking for precise directions from area inhabitants to the farm owned by the Elliots. Back then, tobacco and vegetable farming were chief in the area.

Missouri was a slaveholding state that encouraged slave owners from the southern states to migrate to Missouri with their slaves. The northeast section of Missouri was the biggest slaveholding section of the state. During the time of the Toltons and according to the 1860 census, there were 3,063 slaves and 11,722 whites in Monroe County.

IIt was the practice of some Catholic slave owners to have their slaves baptized Catholic. Outside of soothing the conscience of the slave masters to some degree, Catholicism did not necessarily win any tangible benefits for blacks. There seems to have been some acknowledgment by some owners that the slaves had souls. But then, there existed the unconscionable rationalization that they did not have rights to official marriage and family life, evidenced by the cavalier breaking up of spouses, selling off parents from their children, and children from their parents.

Martha Jane’s husband, Peter Paul, joined the Union Army to fight for the freedom of blacks. News spread rampant about the conversations between the orator Frederick Douglas pressing Abraham Lincoln to allow black troops. The fire of excitement ran through the veins of black men, slave and free, to join up, figuring the question of freedom for blacks was one cause of the War. Peter Paul either meditated upon this desire or decided to do so once the family fled slavery; the record is unclear. The history books seem to indicate there were benefits promised to blacks for fighting on the Union side. However, those benefits were unclear. In any event, Peter

Paul later died in a hospital in Arkansas of dysentery, according to military records found in the archives. Martha Jane would discover this some seven years later, seeing his name on a list of Civil War casualties. We have documentary evidence of her applying for a widow’s pension with the Union Army. She received a benefit of eight dollars per month until her death in 1911.

It is easily surmised what inspired Martha Jane and the family to flee slavery To attempt escape was a daring and dangerous endeavor; many slaves died in the process. In 1863, Stephen Elliott, their owner, died without a registered will. To pay off debts accumulated, his wife was required to have the farm appraised and the estate distributed among their descendants that is, their children. We have on record a copy of the probate and the appraisal of the farm’s contents and monetary value, including the slaves. The little boy Augustus was listed as valued at twentyfive dollars; his mother at fifty dollars; and her brother at one hundred dollars.

Appraisers and perhaps even slave traders milling around stirred fright amongst the slaves, no doubt with the prospect of Martha Jane losing her children. Was she tired of seeing her children suffer without a future of hope and freedom? She was in Missouri because she was given away as a wedding gift to the Elliots, never again to see her parents, Matilda (Hurd) and Augustus Chisley.

Martha and her husband Peter Paul must have plotted their route of escape over and over. It had to be an absolute success. The Underground Railroad, with its scouts, assisted many in escaping their masters. Civil records indicate that Martha’s escape occurred sometime between July and September of 1863. The Civil War was a little better than two years running. It was a time of turmoil and chaos. And slaves were running. As described in the annals of published slave narratives, the consequences of being caught were too awful to consider. In 1863, reaching Hannibal, Missouri, Martha Jane finally brought her children to the town of Quincy, Illinois, a station of the Underground Railroad, after a harrowing escape across some forty-three miles or more of field and forest and swamp, moving at night, hiding during the day, muffling the whimpering of a babe in arms, apprehended at one point by Confederate bounty hunters, and then immediately rescued by Union troops. During a night journey in a dilapidated rowboat across the Mississippi River, it is reported that the same bounty hunters shot at the family with their muskets, but missed. Years later, Augustus noted in a speech that a two-hundred-dollar bounty had been placed on the head of each of them. The probate of the Elliott will reports the financial loss and reimbursement incurred by the slaves’ escape.

II

The backdrop to Augustus Tolton’s boyhood and youth was a very troubled period in American history: the Civil War and the ensuing tumultuous Reconstruction, which entailed the nation’s ambivalence regarding the plight of freed slaves.

According to the history books, the Civil War officially ended in 1865 with the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and his Confederate Army. But, on the streets, another fierce battle was beginning. America was supposed to be reuniting, healing its wounds, and moving past years of civil unrest. However, a close look into that period reveals a sinister snapshot of discontent and Southern anger, a scarred nation caught amid political riots and angry insurgencies while the South counted its losses. The murder, terrorism, and chaos that took place during Reconstruction signaled an uncertain future for this country. Amid the turmoil, the question of the morality of slavery was left unresolved. Without a program of adjustment and assimilation with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, freed slaves were left to be treated haphazardly by society. This grave subtext of the War’s effort was left to morph into laws and lawless customs that guaranteed

that blacks should be kept away from the spaces that whites occupied. In the 1857 Supreme Court Decision Dred Scott v. Sandford, Justice Roger B. Taney had already stoked the fires of racial hatred by writing that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

While the government struggled to gain control, the persecution of free blacks continued in the former Confederate states; for example, terrorist groups such as the Klu Klux Klan, made up of Confederate veterans, emerged in 1866 in the state of Tennessee. The Klu Klux Klan exercised their free speech in the form of violence, intimidation, and murder. Their main targets were articulate and politically active blacks, white people who helped them, and institutions whose aim was to aid blacks, Jews, and Catholics. Membership in the Klu Klux Klan included local law enforcement persons, ministers, lawyers, merchants, and otherwise law-abiding and church-going citizens. While the North seemed to be spared some of the violence, left untreated was the general plight of blacks in American society: their rights to suffrage, education, and economic improvement met with fierce resistance, especially in the South, but also in some places in the North. The social separation of blacks and whites became the norm nationwide. Racial inequality was indeed the social praxis, and much of this was taken for granted by the Christian churches.

III

The race issue split the churches. Ministers and congregations were divided over the question. The three largest Protestant groups Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists formally split their national denominations into sectional factions over the race question. The Presbyterians were first to split in 1837, followed by the Baptists in 1844. In the Methodist Church, a lengthy debate over the right of a slaveholder to serve as a presiding bishop triggered the formation of the breakaway Methodist Episcopal Church in 1846.

While it proved a murky discussion whether black men could serve as ministers in these denominations and whether black people could worship alongside whites in the churches of these denominations, blacks soon got the message. They were forming their churches with their indigenous ministers free churches as they came to be called, mimicking in some respects the contours of the established denominations. And thus what came to be known as the traditional black church experience was formed, shaped and led by the saga of the black experience.

In the Catholic Church, clergy were preoccupied with the needs of the various immigrant groups settling in America who spoke no English, where social intolerance, here and there, erupted in acts of violence between and among groups. Bishops and religious communities of men and women owned slaves. While individual priests were seen baptizing blacks, these same blacks could not worship alongside whites in the churches but were confined to choir lofts and roped-off sections in the rear. The baptismal entries of slaves often would not mention their parentage but only their owners’ names. Weddings of slaves were performed by priests who would not register these marriages in the church’s books because, officially, the marriages of slaves were not given public recognition.

Blacks were not permitted to kneel at the railing with whites for the reception of Holy Communion. The social norm of separate space for whites and blacks meant that blacks were not generally received in our schools, convents, and seminaries for fear that the Church would lose what little prestige it had in a Protestant milieu and be charged with defying the prevailing social mood of the time namely, that whites and blacks do not mix and that for reasons written in nature, if not ordained by the Creator, whites were superior and blacks inferior.

Absent from the program of the Catholic Church was a corporate strategy for the evangelization of the freed slave. Here and there, heroic individual priests and religious ministered unto blacks. However, the Catholic Church was not prepared to deal with the race issue in the face of anti-Catholic prejudice that was prevalent in the country at that time, the need to manage internal morale, and certain internal needs of a burgeoning non-English speaking immigrant church. And to this day, we suffer for lack of an earlier program of attention paid to the black community.

IV

For the vast majority of Southerners, slavery was not a sin. Some slave owners provided their slaves with Christian instruction, figuring they were rescuing them from heathenism. Christians found justification for the system of slavery from specific passages in the Bible. Abolitionists and other conscience-troubled Christians were fearful of this militant defense of slavery that perdured long after Emancipation.

But as the West and East sections of the country grew closer through railroads, telegraph, and newsprint, the South was aggressively seeking to expand slavery into new territories and states where it had been outlawed for decades. As the history books explain, slavery was profitable, a way of life for the South, and vital to the economy of the time. Southerners were unwilling to have further changes to their traditions imposed by the victorious North. They did not want to view as political equals the former slaves whom they considered social inferiors. They also needed blacks to remain a dependent workforce to grow the cash crops on which the South depended: cotton, tobacco, sugar, rice, and other commodities. For many a Southerner, Reconstruction was an annoyance, a period of political uncertainty, poverty, and fearsome social reform. Although they had lost the War, Southerners attempted to maintain traditions of white control using desperate means to redeem the South from Northern domination.

Added to this was European immigration in places north, urban crowding that brought with it a scarcity of jobs, and increased pressures stoking fear, resulting intermittently in riots and mob actions from New England through the Midwest. Slaves and former slaves were allowed only a haphazard participation in American life in the nineteenth century, and there were no laws that would guarantee their movement in society, let alone protect them. Unfortunately, much of this apartheid was coopted by the various churches. Blacks lived a precarious existence at the whim of white America.

VFollowing their escape from slavery, Martha Jane and Augustus worked to support their family in Quincy at several labor jobs: at a tobacco factory, a bottling and beverage factory, and a saddle-making factory. Augustus attended several schools in between seasonal work shifts. He was dismissed from one Catholic school. St. Boniface, due to protests and threats from white parishioners. But an Irish priest, Father Peter McGirr, the sympathetic pastor of St. Peter Parish in Quincy, assured Gus of safety at his parish school. Father McGirr enrolled Augustus in St. Peter Parish School, daring his parishioners to object. Today, the parish names its parish hall after Father Tolton, with a marble monument erected in his likeness.

At St. Peter’s, several priests and sisters took young Tolton under their wing, tutoring him in the catechism, English, German, Latin, and other subjects that would keep him on par academically. From the time Augustus made his First Communion and Confirmation in 1870, he

began to speak about an attraction to the priesthood, but the obstacles to his entrance into a seminary seemed insurmountable. The priests who mentored him saw signs of a religious vocation in Tolton. The young man already worked as a catechist for the neighborhood’s Negro children, serving Mass daily and helping around the church, cleaning and preparing the sacristy, and otherwise showing himself to be a devout young man.

The Franciscan Fathers offered Augustus a scholarship to Quincy College today Quincy University where he studied philosophy and the liberal arts. After almost seven years of writing and inquiry at various seminaries, it was learned that US seminaries would not accept a black student. Sadly, many church institutions did not see it possible to take risks with their reputations by breaking through racial inequality with a counter-witness.

The Franciscan Fathers appealed to their Superior General in Rome, who had contact with the prefect of the Propaganda Fide Again, after an agonizing wait following a back-and-forth of correspondence letters we have obtained from Vatican archives Tolton finally received news that he was accepted to study at the Urbanum in Rome. It was thought that Tolton would prepare for the priesthood and, after ordination, be sent as a missionary to Africa because it was thought that his ministry would be hampered in a country submerged in racial apartheid.

The Propaganda prepared priests to labor in faraway mission territories where, in most instances, the Church worked in primary evangelization. It was thought that the social climate in the United States would thwart Tolton’s work as a priest. Six years (1880-1886) of study later, the Cardinal prefect of the Propaganda, Giovanni Simeoni, told Tolton he would return to the United States. Augustus received this news on April 23rd, 1886, one day before his priestly ordination. Cardinal Simeoni said that the US Church owed it to herself to have a priest of African descent. The Cardinal emphasized that Augustus would be accepted if the United States was as enlightened as it claimed to be.

The Vatican had faith that grace would win out in the United States. Although quite surprised at the late news of his change of appointment, Augustus followed the Cardinal’s advice, inspired by his Propaganda oath to serve where sent, and returned to his bishop in Quincy, Illinois, which at that time was the Diocese of Alton.

The United States, as Rome would come to learn, was not that enlightened. Unbeknownst to Cardinal Simeoni, he sent Tolton back to a path of suffering. Tolton was essentially launched as a missionary to inaugurate the Church’s work among a neglected race, but not without walking through a gauntlet of racial hostility still simmering after the nation’s Civil War, where Americans slaughtered one another over the question of whether former slaves and their descendants could be or should be considered equals to white citizenry.

VI

Father Augustus Tolton received partial acceptance back in his hometown of Quincy, but turmoil soon surrounded him. Prejudiced opposition mounted against him from some Protestant and Catholic clergymen and from one German priest. Father Michael Weiss thought Tolton should restrict himself to ministering to blacks. As it was, white Catholics were inspired by Tolton, came to his Masses and other ministrations and contributed financially to his poor parish. As it turned out, the little St. Joseph Church carved out for a small congregation of blacks was a mission of the nearby German parish of St. Boniface, which had expelled Gus as a boy upon protests of school parents. Father Weiss believed St. Joseph was the cause of St. Boniface’s parish debt.

Fr. Michael Weiss took his objections to the bishop any number of times. Tolton was called to the bishop’s office and reprimanded. He was accused of disturbing the Protestants, who looked at him askance for perpetuating Romanism in the area. He was charged by Catholic clergymen of creating an unacceptable situation of mixing of the races. Being black and Catholic, Tolton lost on both counts. Folks could not put the two together. There were no protocols for being a black priest called to serve everyone. With every step Tolton took, he violated some written or unwritten rule. In due time, amid the storm, sympathetic white people stopped coming to the church where Tolton served.

As opposition mounted towards Tolton, it became apparent that Tolton would be asked to leave Quincy, where he had begun a credible ministry to the Negro community and where black Catholics were accustomed to the gift of a priest who looked like them. As suggested by his bishop, Father Tolton searched around the country for a benevolent bishop who would accept him. Amid the furor, Archbishop Patrick Feehan invited Father Tolton to work among African Americans in Chicago. Tolton hesitated answering the Archbishop until the situation in Quincy became intolerable, and with permission of his superiors in Rome, granted begrudgingly, he finally accepted the Archbishop’s invitation. He went to Chicago in December 1889, the week before Christmas.

Keep in mind, Tolton grew up in a time where it was forbidden for a black man to look a white man in the eye when spoken to or while addressing a white man, a time in which it was inconceivable for blacks to mingle in the same space as whites. It was a time when a train ride meant there was one railroad car set aside for blacks, and if there weren’t enough seats, you had to stand until a seat was freed up, and where public restrooms, eating establishments, rooming houses, educational institutions, even cemeteries were off limits to blacks. Laws, written and unwritten, humiliations of one sort or another, perpetuated the inferior status of black people without recourse, appeal, or objection. Tolton would not live to see the overturn of legalized racial segregation in America through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 some seventy-five years into the future.

VII

Father Tolton became the founding pastor of the new Negro apostolate, St. Monica Catholic Church, at 36th and Dearborn Streets. He also took under his wing the fledgling congregation of Negro Catholics named “The St. Augustine Society” that gathered in the basement of St. Mary Church in downtown Chicago at 9th and Wabash Streets.

The well-educated Father Tolton proved a wise priest, but his priesthood was hampered by isolation, the extreme poverty of his congregants, the broad lack of institutional attention to freed slaves, his self-doubt, and protracted economic hardship. His letters to Mother (Saint) Katherine Drexel portray much of his pathos in that socially intolerant era. Tolton was dedicated to the people, faithfully visited the sick and rescued the desperate poor on Chicago’s south side’s tenement and substandard neighborhoods.

He was offered many speaking engagements in church circles, especially in the east, addressing black and white assemblies of Catholics in Boston, Philadelphia, Galveston, Washington, DC, and other places. He was invited to offer High Mass and addressed the first two, if not three, Colored Catholic Congresses. There, he expounded upon the aspirations of the black race and called upon the Church to assist in improving a neglected and disenfranchised race.

But sadly, the drumbeat of inequality was reinforced in 1896 with the Supreme Court’s decision Plessey vs. Ferguson in a vote of 7 to 1, which endorsed as lawful various state laws ordering racial separation under the social doctrine of “separate but equal.” This court’s decision gave legitimacy to the many racist practices our parents and grandparents grew up with, such as separate washrooms, separate entrances to buildings, separate drinking water fountains, separate restaurant and public transportation facilities, and separate schools that aided and abetted a culture of discrimination and unfair treatment. This is the world that Father Tolton knew and within which he died.

VIII

Tolton’s health began to show signs of exhaustion and emotional distress. Following eight years of pastoral labors in Chicago trying to build a church for his congregation, a church that would symbolize that black Catholics had a place in the Archdiocese, he died at the age of fortythree. His death was the result of complications associated with heatstroke during an exceptional heatwave that hit Chicago the first week of July 1897. The daily newspapers reported that more than sixty people, including two priests, died that week of unabated heat.

No information in the archival record speaks of Father Tolton’s health condition. Blacks seldom had access to adequate health care beyond old-fashioned folk remedies. Few, if any, reputable hospitals would take blacks as patients where whites were served. Tolton could well have suffered from untreated hypertension, maybe even tuberculosis, or been exposed to the other common diseases of the time His parishioners, however, were aware that Father Augustus was wearing himself out by hard work that included the mental stress connected with fundraising to support his parish and maneuvering the pervasively choppy waters of racial acceptance. Sometimes, he had to ask the altar boy to bring him a chair because he could not stand up to deliver his sermon. In the nineteenth century, before antibiotics were available, it was not uncommon for priests to die before the age of fifty because they were often exposed to people with a variety of communicable diseases. The archival record carries no information that Tolton ever saw a doctor.

Getting off the train in Chicago, the 35th Street station at Lake Park Avenue, returning from a priests’ spiritual retreat down in Bourbonnais, Illinois, on that hot and steamy July 9, Father Tolton collapsed on the street while walking to his rectory ten blocks distant. Area constables rushed him to Mercy Hospital. The Mercy Sisters were asked if they would accept him and this emergency. And they accepted him. The medical personnel worked on him all afternoon and evening and he died about eight-thirty that same evening. By his specific request, he is buried at St. Peter Cemetery in Quincy, Illinois.

Augustus Tolton was a man beset on all sides by racism and its tragic consequences. A Roman collar around the neck of a black man was an anomaly in the white community and a news sensation in the black community. Yet Tolton dared to believe that no door can be kept closed against the movement of the Lord and the power of the Holy Spirit. Through it all, Tolton remained a welcome minister of souls, regardless of who they were. He consistently showed himself an open, optimistic spirit. He had a pastor’s heart.

He preached that the Catholic Church was the chief means for improving the circumstances of the black man. And his loyalty to the Church as a Catholic priest was without guile. His sanctity

arises from his perseverance, his patient suffering in face of repeated disappointment, his dutifulness in the face of some large odds, his cheerfulness, his pastoral zeal, his abiding love for the Church and his unfailing sense of obedience. He carried the cross of being the first black Catholic priest of his time, and of a world and church which showed steadfast unreadiness for his type of universal ministry. In all this, Father Tolton remains an uplifting sign of hope and promise. Father Tolton sensed that the Church is much larger than its members in what it stands for and he understood that the Church harbors saints and sinners. Even the Lord spoke of this with the parable of the weeds among the wheat. Tolton’s approach has been the outlook of faithful African American Catholics over the many years. They know there’s truth to the Church that cannot be ignored. Some people are representatives of that truth, and others are not. Admittedly, there are those African American Catholics who have been put off by the Catholics who have not represented the Gospel injunction about love of neighbor and the Chruch’s teaching about human dignity and have picked up and gone elsewhere … in some instances, when they were told to go elsewhere.

X

Admittedly, Father Tolton’s approach to the problem of racism is not everyone’s cup of tea. Some would think it too passive and ineffective given the historical stretch of this social problem and the human suffering it has wreaked for so many and for so long. But it is substantively the Christian and Catholic approach where one may find echoes of Christ.

Tolton was no Moses, Frederick Douglas, or Martin Luther King. The racial situation of that time did not offer him much in the way of alternatives. He and others took their chances. It was risky. Therefore, Tolton’s manner and disposition is worthy of discussion and debate. His story has prevailed over time. He is remembered today primarily as a gentle pastor, one who knew pain and rejection and returned nothing in return to his enemies except Christian regard, innocent hospitality, and priestly care. It is possible to lead a holy life, as did Father Tolton, but not without bearing up under the cross. This is holiness in the Christian imagination of things. Tolton’s holiness emerges from an experience of the Cross. His goodness elicits our affection and empathy: It was a goodness that attracted people of whatever background to his sermons, ministrations, and counsel. His life story inserts a dialectic into a begrudging situation of intransigence to social and moral change, namely, to see dignity inherent in black skin.

Certainly, being first a Christian and a Catholic and having in his young years the example of several nuns and priests who were people of care and vision who tutored him and encouraged him, Tolton transferred the same qualities he observed in these people to his pastoral ministry. He believed the Church was much larger than where he was born, raised, lived, and pastored. And that is what endeared him to many people both white and black.

His church doors in St. Joseph, Quincy, were open to white and black alike, eventually getting him into serious trouble. The lines of demarcation were set rigidly in the nineteenth century. However, Father Tolton believed the chief mission of the church was to unite people of every race and apply dignity to every person. His magnetism, wisdom, and pastoral zeal saw him welcome men and women of every skin tone together under one roof for worship a novel idea for that time that disturbed some folks. He was perceived to be a remarkable specimen of a black human being notwithstanding being a man of the cloth, and that is why white people snuck into his church on Sundays when they were not supposed to be there. The wholesale institutional racism of that time

didn’t allow such. And yet, people are naturally attracted to goodness most of the time when they can get away with it.

In retrospect, there were passages of the gospel paradoxically passed over in preaching and praxis by American Christians. And there were the abolitionists, too: a collection of Christians, Jews, atheists, deists, agnostics, and sheer humanists who also underwent persecution by the proponents of slavery.

The same virtues that were conspicuously the engine of Tolton’s personality have not gone out of style. We are still trying to grasp what that means for us today, because we live such socially demarcated lives. White and black and brown do not know one another. We seldom experience one another outside work settings, only to return to segregated housing and worship patterns, so there are these fears that hold sway about the other. And sometimes those fears can erupt into something awful, as we have seen recently.

We are a country that immigrants consider a land of opportunity and freedom. This opportunity and freedom have come in part by the shedding of blood, a great loss of life, and much grief, a story still narrated in the oral sayings running through African American families. Ours is still a land where isolated incidents of racial violence, hate crimes, and practices of racial inequality take place. All is not perfect here. And, sometimes, the gospel message of human dignity has not been proclaimed enough by word and example in our churches. At best, the American thing remains a work in progress.

As an American born and raised to live a heroic Christian life, Tolton is of our culture. He battled to make the culture better and more Christ-like. We can, and many have, participated in this battle with him. Whites participated in the Underground Railroad’s rescue of escaped slaves. The Underground Railroad authenticated the basic humanity of blacks and those participating in the rescue of blacks seeking freedom. Several religious priests and men and women took Tolton by the hand, walked with him through the dark forest of race prejudice, and worked a victory.

It is a touching story of perseverance and goodwill. Tolton is an inspirational model of how we Christians can handle persecution and hardship along life’s path, navigating through the disappointments that life throws at us.

Saints are men and women who are members of the Church, who lived and died in and for the Church. These men and women took the gospel and lived it with heroic seriousness in the circumstances of their time. Many of the saints encountered great suffering in their lives but ended up with their faith, hope, and love intact in imitation of Jesus Christ, whose suffering and rejection redeemed the world of its sin while reconciling it with God.

For a devout young man who struggled so much for acceptance, former slave and faithful priest, who was delivered the word “no” more often than not, we hope the Church can say “yes” to raising Father Augustus Tolton to the honors of the altar as a saint.

The material in this article was originally delivered by the author as the annual Dehon Lecture at Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology in Franklin, Wisconsin, in the spring of 2021. Bishop Joseph Perry is Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of Chicago and diocesan postulator for the canonization cause of Fr. Augustus Tolton, who was advanced to the title of venerable on June 11, 2019, by Pope Francis. The official website of the Archdiocese of Chicago for the Cause for Sainthood of Fr. Tolton can be found at https://tolton.archchicago.org/. Dr. Paul G. Monson was one of the original respondents to Bishop Perry’s lecture, and his response has been published in the current issue of Chicago Studies, directly following this article.

Selected Bibliography

Archives of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Maryland

Archives of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Illinois

Archives of the Blessed Sacrament Sisters (SBS), Bensalem, Pennsylvania

Archives of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois

Archives of the Franciscan (OFM) Generalate, Rome, Italy

Archives of the Josephite Fathers (SSJ) in St. Joseph’s Advocate, Baltimore, Maryland, 1887, 1888

Archives of the School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND), Elm Grove, Wisconsin

Archives of the Vatican, Vatican City & Archives of the Vatican Propaganda Fide, Vatican City

Davis, Cyprian, OSB. The History of Black Catholics. New York: Crossroad, 1990.

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/

Duriga, Joyce. Augustus Tolton: The Church Is the True Liberator. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018.

Gagnet Leumas, Emilie, CA. “Augustus Tolton Research.” PhD diss., Historical Commission, Archdiocese of Chicago.

Genosky, Landry, OFM. People’s History of Quincy-Adams County. Quincy, IL: Jost & Kiefer Co., 1975.

Hemesath, Caroline, SSF. From Slave to Priest: The Inspirational Story of Father Augustine Tolton. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1973.

Penn, Sabrina A, and Roy Bauer. A Place for My Children: Father Augustus Tolton, America’s First Known Black Catholic Priest and His Ancestry. Chicago, IL: Penn Ink, 2007.

Positio Super Vita, Virtutibus Et Fama Sanctitatis: Congregatio De Causis Sanctorum Beatificationis Et Canonizationis Servi Dei Augustini Tolton Sacerdotis Dioecesani Chicagiensis (1854-1897), Roma 2018.

Relatio Et Vota Congressus Peculiaris Super Virtutibus Die 5 February Ann. 2019 Habiti, Romae 2019.

The Tolton Collection at Brenner Library, Quincy University, Quincy, Illinois

The Chicago Daily Tribune, 1892, 1893

The Quincy Daily Journal, 1886, 1889, 1890, 1893, 1897

The Quincy Herald Whig, 1886, 1887, 1897

Fr. Augustus Tolton as a Transatlantic Story: A Response to Bishop Perry

By Paul G. Monson, Ph.D.

In 1954, exactly one hundred years after the birth of Fr. Augustus Tolton (1854-1897), a Swiss abbot arrived in southern Indiana for the centennial celebration of St. Meinrad Archabbey. The abbot came from St. Meinrad’s motherhouse, the renowned Abbey of Maria Einsiedeln, home to a medieval Schwarze Madonna, or Black Madonna, one that had attracted pilgrims across Europe for centuries. With him, the Swiss abbot brought an exact replica of this Black Madonna Upon its presentation to the American community, he placed the statue in the hands to the only black monk of St. Meinrad, adding the comment, “now there are two of you.” 1

This young monk was Fr. Cyprian Davis, OSB (1930-2015), the great historian of black Catholics in the United States. Although the abbot’s gesture might strike us today as somewhat paternalistic, there is no indication that Fr. Cyprian ever took offense, for if there was only going to be “two of them” in the abbey, the Blessed Mother was fine company. This very statue replaced a white-skinned Madonna that had graced the abbey church for decades and reflected a conscious decision, according to some, not to introduce a Black Madonna so close to the Mason-Dixie Line. 2

The Swiss abbot’s ostensible agenda was to remind his American confreres that their spiritual, historical, and ecclesial identity extended well beyond the segregated landscape of midcentury America. After all, 1954 was also the year of Brown vs. Board of Education, a salvo against segregation in state schools, and a ruling that some Catholics not only demurred but even ignored, considering their schools exempt. 3

I begin with this historical example because the cause for Fr. Augustus Tolton’s canonization is first and foremost a historical matter. Canonization is an act of memory on the part of the Church, an act that informs her story, her mission, and even her art. Indeed, one searches almost in vain for the memory of black Catholics in the stained glass, marble statuary, and celestial mosaics that adorn the great sanctuaries of American Catholics. And this omission has an inescapable history, a Catholic history, reflected in the very life of a man affectionately known as “Fr. Gus.”

It was a Catholic family that owned Fr. Gus’s mother, Martha, and decided to painfully separate her from her family in Kentucky upon the marriage of a white daughter. 4 This was before Fr. Gus was even born. It was a Catholic Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court who penned the infamous Dred Scott decision denying citizenship to free blacks. 5 Fr. Gus was only four at the time. On the eve of the Civil War, it was a Catholic handbook of moral theology, used in American seminaries well into the nineteenth century, that refused to trouble consciences about slavery, endorsing its endurance. 6 It was a Catholic bishop who, shortly after the outbreak of the war, defended slavery as an “eminently Christian work” in its ability to enlighten the “race of Canaan” from an “intellect of the blackest type.” 7 Fr. Gus was seven. It was Catholic immigrant workers in New York City, mostly Irish, who rioted against conscription for the Union while lynching and murdering blacks who, they presumed, were now going to take their jobs after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. 8 Fr. Gus was only nine and had just escaped from Missouri to the free state of Illinois The following year, it was another Catholic bishop who officially represented the cause of the Confederacy in Europe. 9 After the war, it was the first Catholic university of the United States that refused to admit blacks, while its Jesuit president refused to acknowledge the secret heritage of his enslaved mother, even though he, along with his two brothers, were the first

African Americans ordained to the priesthood in the United States. 10 Such was the shame of African roots. Fr. Gus was twenty at the time, and as he sought further education, seminary doors remained closed to him, for he could not hide his racial heritage. It was a Catholic priest who racially harassed and demonized Fr. Gus when he returned to Quincy, to the point that he sought a new chapter in Chicago. 11 That this priest’s last name, Weis, is likely a contraction of the German word for “white” only adds drama to Fr. Gus’s saga. Fr. Gus was thirty-two at the time of his ordination and return (what some might call a late vocation, certainly then), and yet a fellow priest treated him like a child. And, to add insult to injury, it was a Catholic black man from Louisiana who was the losing plaintiff in Plessy vs. Ferguson, a Supreme Court decision confirming “separate but equal” as the law of the land. 12 Fr. Gus was 42, just one year before his sudden death.

But these events form only one side of Fr. Gus’s life and its Catholic context. It was a network of Catholic priests, both Irish and German, who fostered his vocation, first as a boy, then as a catechist, and finally as a seminarian. It was two Catholic religious communities who assisted Fr. Gus in his education, first in a parochial school and then via admission to the local Catholic college (despite the protests of other Catholics). It was the Catholic laity, both black and white, who filled the pews of Fr. Gus’s first assignment, St. Joseph’s Negro Church, and who supported the parish financially, prompting the irate jealousy and racial slurs of Fr. Weis at St. Boniface down the street. 13 It was a Catholic bishop who wrote the Urbanum in Rome on behalf of the young Fr. Gus after American seminaries had turned him away. And it was a Catholic Cardinal who welcomed Fr. Gus to Rome, supported his formation, and sent him back to the United States to bear the light of Christ in a land that claimed the torch of liberty 14

And here we see marks of solidarity through the memory of Fr. Gus. One of the priests who nurtured Fr. Gus’s vocation, Fr. John Janssen, went on to become the first bishop of the Diocese of Belleville, a longtime sponsor of Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology in Wisconsin. It was Fr. Janssen who ensured that Fr. Gus’s first Mass in Quincy was at St. Boniface, the same parish that had chased his mother and family away shortly after their arrival. 15 The sisters who staffed the free school for blacks in Quincy were from the School Sisters of Notre Dame convent in Milwaukee. 16 The German Franciscans who supported Gus and admitted him to their college also built and (until 2020) staffed St. Francis Solanus Church in downtown Quincy. The church edifice would have been brand new upon Fr. Gus’s return to Quincy, and it is one of the few Catholic structures left in Quincy that Fr. Gus would recognize today. 17 And one of Fr. Gus’s dearest friends from his days in Chicago, Lincoln Valle, went on to establish the first black parish in Milwaukee, St. Benedict the Moor, a parish that endures to this day. 18

But here memory’s fertile common ground also unearths embarrassments. In Quincy, St. Peter’s Church the parish of Fr. Gus’s youth, first communion, and confirmation suffered such severe damage from a tornado in 1945 that the parish was relocated to a new site away from downtown. 19 St. Boniface the site of Tolton’s first hometown Mass succumbed to a steeple fire in 1959, leading to its demolition and reconstruction in a stark modernist style the following year. 20 This edifice closed its doors in 2007, now standing empty. 21 And Fr. Gus’s first pastoral assignment, St. Joseph, is long gone, sold off in 1892, not even three years after Fr. Gus left his hometown for Chicago. 22 And what of his parish in Chicago, St. Monica, a humble parish that defied the segregated norm in its day? A more august name than that of Fr. Gus, a name later celebrated as Chicago’s first cardinal, redefined St. Monica as an exclusively black parish ten years after Fr. Gus’s death, and the same cardinal eventually closed the parish. The structure Fr. Gus had tirelessly collected funds to build was torn down twenty years later, about the same time a tornado in Quincy destroyed his childhood parish. 23 Today sleek condominiums occupy St. Monica’s old

site, surrounded by altars dedicated to American consumerism. But lest we be accused of pointing self-righteous fingers at our brethren in Chicago, let us come to terms with a most uncomfortable memory we’d rather forget. If Fr. Gus was indeed rejected by all eighteen seminaries that existed in the United States at the time, and then only because of his race (since his bishop had publicly stated his financial support for any seminary), then our beloved St. Francis de Sales Seminary in Milwaukee was likely on that list, especially with its connection to the German Franciscans who wrote on Fr. Gus’s behalf. 24 In his history of the archdiocese, Fr. Steven Avella confirms that St. Francis de Sales did not welcome black seminarians until the 1950s. 25 This is an uncomfortable but inescapable memory for Milwaukee’s Catholics, who have benefited from the venerable history and spiritual vitality of St. Francis de Sales Seminary.

But the beautiful thing about memories is that they arrest amnesia. In Fr. Gus’s hometown, for the past few years, local Catholics join in an annual procession to his gravesite. 26 Now a prominent sign sits under the modern bell tower of shuttered St. Boniface, announcing with pride to the passing eye that it once hosted Fr. Gus’s first Mass while asking for his intercession. In Chicago, where the late Cardinal George initiated the cause for canonization during the Year of the Priest in 2010, the archdiocese aggressively promotes the legacy of Fr. Gus, with its own mitered ambassador, Bishop Perry And this ambassador of Fr. Gus is, in fact, not only a graduate of St. Francis de Sales Seminary, but also the first African American priest ordained for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee We all, in a way, owe a debt of gratitude to this local seminary.

But let’s face it: no one likes to be accused of amnesia, and some might dismiss these memories as political machinations, a canonization cause gaining momentum after recent events. The historian’s response? Of course it’s political. Bishop Perry has reminded us that Fr. Gus’s cause is not designed to chastise whiteness. This is true. But I at least, as the descendant of German and Irish Catholics, on this St. Patrick’s Day no less, welcome a little chastisement of white memory, for its chastisement, via the process of canonization, has a long tradition in the Church’s history. As Fr. Cyprian reminds us, the three saints most associated with Black Catholicism were raised to the altars to chide the amnesia of white Catholics.

The namesake of Milwaukee’s oldest black parish, and the one established by Fr. Gus’s friend, is St. Benedict the Moor (1526-1589). St. Benedict was a sixteenth-century freed slave in Sicily, who lived a life of unbounded charity. Although famous in his day throughout Italy, he was not canonized until 1807 by Pope Pius VII, an act directed at the revival of slavery in Napoleon’s empire. 27 St. Peter Claver (1580-1654), the Jesuit namesake of the Knights and Ladies of Peter Claver, was not canonized until 1888 by Pope Leo XIII, the same year that papal prodding had finally convinced Brazil, a land home to more Catholics than any other nation, to finally outlaw African slavery. 28 Brazil was the last Western nation to do so. And then there is St. Martin de Porres (1579-1639), perhaps the most iconic of the Church’s black saints. This famous Dominican lay brother, a hero of the streets of seventeenth-century Lima, was denied ordination because of the laws of the Spanish Empire, which worried that the mixing of races would taint respect for the clergy. He is now not only respected but revered in the Catholic pantheon. But we forget, as Fr. Cyprian reminds us, that Martin remained forgotten until Pope Gregory XVI beatified him in 1837, two years before the same pope condemned the slave trade (a condemnation ignored by Catholics in the American South). And it was not until 1962 that Pope St. John XXIII canonized Martin, during the American presidency of a Catholic, and partly in response to the public escalation of racial tensions in the United States. 29 Pope John was simply following papal precedent.

And it is in this papal prerogative to revive our memory that one discovers the greatest lesson from Fr. Gus’s priestly life: a transatlantic lesson. Technically, Fr. Gus was neither a priest

of the Diocese of Alton (now Springfield) nor of the Archdiocese of Chicago. Although these dioceses provided key settings for Fr. Gus’s life and are currently collaborating toward his canonization, Fr. Gus was actually a priest of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, knowns as Propaganda Fide, which maintained jurisdiction over the US Catholic Church until 1908. 30 By virtue of his education at the Urbanum, Propaganda Fide’s Roman college, founded for missionary efforts and the only seminary to admit him, Fr. Gus became a Roman missionary sent back to America. He was ordained in the Lateran Basilica, the pope’s cathedral in Rome. His very first Mass, on Easter Sunday no less, was celebrated at the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, directly over the bones of the fisherman and under the dazzling dome of Michelangelo and baroque baldacchino of Bernini. 31 When he returned, the majority of his correspondence is addressed neither to Alton nor to Chicago but rather to Rome. His priestly formation was a transatlantic affair; his priestly vocation was a transatlantic affair. And his priestly canonization, by definition, is a transatlantic affair. (And it is worth pointing out that no native-born priest has yet to be canonized for the United States Tolton would be the first.)

In US Catholic historiography, the term “transatlantic” typically applies to European immigration, the ancestors of many in this room. Its focus is on the north Atlantic, not the south, blind to the one of the darkest chapters of history, the transatlantic slave trade that brought Tolton’s ancestors to this continent. As already noted, and fifteen years before Fr. Gus’s birth, Pope Gregory XVI (the same pope who established the dioceses of Milwaukee and Chicago) explicitly condemned this transatlantic trade. But Gregory XVI was an unlikely candidate; he also condemned railroads, and no one took him as a scion of progress. But as Fr. Cyprian points out, Gregory had spent much of his career in Propaganda Fide, where he saw how slavery’s inhumanity both impeded evangelization and scarred the Church. 32

And thus it is no accident that the only seminary to accept Fr. Gus was the Urbanum, the college of Propaganda Fide. And here we might even discern something of a felix culpa in the rejection of Fr. Gus by American seminaries on this continent. In Rome, Fr. Gus discovered a truly global church, not confined to any one continent. His fellow seminarians came from every place imaginable, and he witnessed a universal Church that undermined the culture of American segregation. He returned to America as a prophetic voice, a witness to the reality of many American seminaries today, in this century. For our seminarians and priests reflect not only a transatlantic church, but also a transpacific and trans-hemispheric church, filled with vocations that reflect a universal Church, a Church that defines the future of American Catholicism. They further mirror, we should add, the very vision of Fr. Gus’s contemporary (and also a “Venerable”), Fr. Leo John Dehon.

So, dear seminarians, embrace Fr. Gus not as someone else’s saint, but as your own. But do not embrace him merely for historical, political, or prophetic reasons. For the best reason is personal. As Bishop Perry has stated, the example of Fr. Gus is one in which “holiness arises from his perseverance.” And this is why it is fitting that his cause stems from the Year of the Priest. Because when one considers Fr. Gus’s story, his life was not only one of perseverance, but also one of foolishness, or at least, foolishness according to the rubrics of this world and its memory The path he embraced welcomed trial and obscurity, not fortune or fame. He refused travel and speaking engagements because his vocation, as he saw it, was as a shepherd to an impoverished community in need of his every waking hour, first in Quincy, and later in Chicago. And over 100 years later, the direct fruits of his labor seem meager at best. No grand church like the one he envisioned for St. Monica. No opus of writings for posterity. No celebration in the dusty annals of American Catholicism, his life a mere footnote or a sentence at best. Indeed his life, by all

accounts, was a failure: failure to enter an American seminary; failure to thrive in his hometown; failure to establish a lasting community in Chicago. But is not this the failure of saints, the failure of the cross? For those who succeed in this life, are soon forgotten. And those who fail, the Church remembers.

The material in this article was originally delivered by the author as a response to Bishop Joseph Perry’s Dehon Lecture at Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology in Franklin, Wisconsin, in 2021. Bishop Perry’s original lecture is published in the same issue of Chicago Studies as this response, in the immediately preceding article.

1 Author’s conversation with Fr. Martin Werlen, OSB (former Abbot of Einsiedeln), April 12, 2012.

2 The original statue dated from 1858 and, although modeled after the original in Einsiedeln, was painted with white skin. A photograph appears in Albert Kleber, History of St. Meinrad Archabbey: 1854–1954 (St. Meinrad, IN: Grail, 1954), 437. The statue appears to have been saved in the fire of 1887. On its origins, see 120.

3 On American Catholic resistance to Brown vs. Board of Education, see Mark Newman, Desegregating Dixie: The Catholic Church in the South and Desegregation, 1945-1992 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2018), 19-41.

4 Joyce Duriga, Augustus Tolton: The Church Is the True Liberator (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Pres, 2018), 3.

5 Roger Taney (1777-1864) was a Catholic and the Chief Justice at the time of the decision. On Taney and his position on slavery, see Timothy S. Huebner, “Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking Beyond and Before Dred Scott,” The Journal of American History 97, no. 1 (June 2010): 17-38.

6 Francis Patrick Kenrick, Theologia moralis, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Eugene Cummiskey, 1841-1843). Kenrick served as Archbishop of Baltimore, American Catholicism’s primatial see, during the Civil War.

7 Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 51-52. The quotation is from Bishop Auguste Marie Martin of Natchitoches, Louisiana.

8 Davis, Black Catholics, 58.

9 Patrick Carey, Catholics in America: A History, rev. ed. (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2004), 44. See also David C. R. Heisser and Stephen J. White Sr., Patrick N. Lynch, 1817-1882: Third Catholic Bishop of Charleston (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015).

10 Patrick Healy, S.J., served as president of Georgetown University from 1873 to 1882. His father, a plantation owner in Georgia, had three sons by one of his slaves, Eliza. Patrick, along with his brothers James and Sherwood, looked white and did not identify as black. All three found a vocation to the priesthood in Massachusetts. James Healy became the first native-born, black priest ordained in the United States in 1854 (the same year of Tolton’s birth) and later served as Bishop of Portland, Maine. On the Healy brothers, see Duriga, Tolton, 21-28. Georgetown admitted its first black undergraduate in 1950. See Elizabeth Garbitelli, “First Black Undergraduate Dies,” The Hoya (March 15, 2012).

11 On Fr. Michael Weis, see Duriga, Tolton, 48-49; Margaret Ehrhardt, Saint Boniface Church, 1837-1987 (Quincy, Ill.: Pam Printers and Publishers, 1987), 29-40. Ehrhardt’s overview of Weis as pastor of St. Boniface (18871909) celebrates him as the “Financier of St. Boniface” and is silent about Weis’s interactions with Tolton. Ehrhardt briefly mentions Tolton only in relation to his first mass at St. Boniface in 1886 (“which drew upon it the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics of the entire country”) and describes his sudden departure from Quincy in 1889 “on account of the apathy indifference of his charges” (26). This description is verbatim from Theodore Bruener, Souvenir of the Diamond Jubilee of St. Boniface Congregation, Quincy, Illinois, Including an Historical Sketch, 1837-1912 (Quincy, Ill.: Jost and Kiefer, 1912), 44. Ehrhardt’s sesquicentennial history further suggests that St. Boniface failed to mark the centenary of this historic mass (in 1986, a year before its publication). The book does, however, casually claim Tolton in its list of “Vocations” from the parish (106).

12 Homer Plessy (1862-1925) was a Creole Catholic in New Orleans. See Sheldon Novick, “Homer Plessy’s Forgotten Plea for Inclusion: Seeing Color, Erasing Color-Lines,” West Virginia Law Review 118, no. 3 (2016): 1191.

13 St. Joseph began as a Catholic school experiment for local black children in 1877, in what had formerly been a Protestant church purchased by St. Boniface. It successfully attracted both Catholic and Protestant families (despite some local protest), leading to its reorganization as a church with a school in 1882. The church lacked stable

pastoral leadership until Tolton’s assignment in 1886, upon his return from Rome. See Theodore Bruener, History of the Catholic Church in Quincy, trans. Lester Holtschlag (Quincy, IL.: The Great River Genealogical Society, 2006), 203-206. This text is a translation of Bruener’s original German book of the same title from 1887. Amid his glowing appraisal of Tolton’s first year of work at St. Joseph (his “church is filled every Sunday”), Bruener curiously credits the apathy of local blacks for Tolton’s inability to gain more converts to Catholicism, adding, “If success is not better in a year, Father Tolton will have to shake the dust from his feet and seek a more rewarding field” (205). The same year Bruener relinquished his role as pastor of St. Boniface to Fr. Weis, and this comment further highlights how Weis’s racial harassment of Tolton occurred within the context of unreasonable expectations for the new black priest.

14 Duriga, Tolton, 6-14, 34-36. Fr. Peter McGirr of St. Peter, Fr. John Janssen of St. Boniface, and Fr. Michael Richardt, OFM, all played a critical role in Tolton’s vocation. The religious orders included the German Franciscans of St. Francis Solano College in Quincy and the School Sisters of Notre Dame in Milwaukee. The bishop was John Baltes of Alton, and the cardinal was Giovanni Simeoni of Propaganda Fide.

15 Duriga, Tolton, 37. Janssen served as both pastor of St. Boniface and administrator of the Diocese of Alton (upon the sudden death of Bishop Baltes) when Tolton returned to Quincy in 1886.

16 Ibid., 9. It remains unclear whether they continued to staff St. Joseph’s Negro Church when Tolton returned to Quincy and assumed it as his first assignment. These sisters taught Tolton when he was enrolled in parochial school both at St. Boniface and St. Peter (Bruener, History, 201-202, 207-208, 214).

17 Joseph Zimmerman, A Story of Quincy University: Catholic, Franciscan, Beginning Again, The First 150 Years (Quincy, IL.: Quincy University, 2010), 150.

18 Duriga, Tolton, 65-68, 86. On Valle, see Davis, Black Catholics, 210-213.

19 Roy Bauer, “We Have Been Led”: A History of St. Peter Church, Quincy, Illinois (2012), 47. According Ehrhardt, this tragedy precluded the closure of St. Boniface, which was set to merge with St. Peter the same year (St. Boniface, 53). In contrast to Ehrhardt’s history, Bauer’s book contains a more extensive inclusion of Tolton’s story (34) and a parish celebration of the centenary of his death in 1997 (59).

20 Ehrhardt, St. Boniface, 65. The church of Tolton’s first Mass in Quincy had since been renovated in 1911 and 1936, with further discussion of its replacement in 1954 (49, 63).

21 David Adam, “Quincy Church Selling Off Pieces of History,” Herald-Whig (August 28, 2007).

22 Bruener, Souvenir, 53. A rare photograph of this church appears in Zimmerman (A Story, 39), and a sketch of its appearance in Tolton’s day can be found in Bauer (“We Have Been Led,” 34).

23 Duriga, Tolton, 86, 88.

24 Ibid., 10-11.

25 Steven M. Avella, In the Richness of the Earth: A History of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, 1943-1958 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2002), 358-9.

26 Author’s interview with Fr. Daren Zehnle (priest of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois [formerly Alton]), March 2, 2021.

27 Davis, Black Catholics, 19. Although Davis notes Pius’s political gesture, he omits its Napoleonic context. In 1802, Napoleon reinstituted slavery in the midst of the Haitian Revolution (after it had been abolished during the French Revolution in 1794). See Robin Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 643-674. By the time of Benedict’s canonization in 1807, relations between Paris and Rome had deteriorated over the neutrality of papal ports and violations of the concordat, culminating in the French capture of Rome in 1808 and Pius’s imprisonment the following year. See Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2014), 268-69.

28 Davis, Black Catholics, 23. Leo XIII’s encyclical on slavery to the bishops of Brazil, In Plurimis, appeared on May 5, 1888, one week before slavery’s final abolition in the empire. On the other economic and political factors of this abolition, see Rafael Marquese, Tâmis Parron, and Márcia Berbel, Slavery and Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790–1850, trans. Leonardo Marques (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2016).

29 Davis, Black Catholics, 25-26.

30 This insight comes from the author’s interview with Fr. Daren Zehnle (see above).

31 Duriga, Tolton, 34-35. Tolton used a temporary altar rather than the papal altar.

32 Davis, Black Catholics, 40; Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 279, 281, 285. Gregory also officially abolished galley slaves in the Papal States in 1831. See Ulrich Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 186. On the papacy’s relationship to slavery in the Italian context, including the role of Propaganda Fide, see Guilia Bonazza, Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States, 1750-1850 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 62-66, 116-129.

Authors’ Page

Rev. Msgr. Milam J. Joseph

The Reverend Monsignor Milam J. Joseph is a priest of the Diocese of Dallas, the son of Lebanese immigrants to Texas, and President Emeritus of the University of Dallas. He was educated at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Dallas, and the Catholic University of America. Throughout his priestly ministry, Msgr. Joseph has consistently advocated for the marginalized and oppressed, collaborating with several charities and foundations He contributed to the famous 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe, which ruled in favor of the rights of undocumented children to a free public education

Most Rev. Mark J. Seitz

The Most Reverend Mark J. Seitz, D.D., is the sixth Bishop of the Diocese of El Paso. He holds his B.A. in Philosophy, his Master of Divinity, and his M.A. in Theology from the University of Dallas. He also earned an M.A. in Liturgical Studies at St. John’s University in Minnesota, and taught liturgy and sacramental theology at the University of Dallas. He was the Vice-Rector and Director of Liturgy at Holy Trinity Seminary from 1987 to 1993 and was named Prelate of Honor to His Holiness by Pope St. John Paul II in 2004

Rev. Raymond J. Webb

The Reverend Raymond J. Webb is a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Pastoral Theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, where he served for several years as academic dean He holds an M.A. and a S.T.L. from the University of St. Mary of the Lake, as well as an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Loyola University of Chicago. Over the years he has been involved in the academic, pastoral, and formational dimensions of USML. His publications and interests include the morale of priests, MuslimCatholic dialogue, human rights and religion, the situation of migrants, income inequality, and empathy. He is a member of the Catholic Theological Society of America, the American Psychological Association, the International Academy of Practical Theology, and the International Society for Empirical Research in Theology.

Most Rev. Joseph N. Perry

The Most Reverend Joseph N. Perry, J.C.L., D.D., is Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of the Archdiocese of Chicago. His priestly ministry has especially focused on education and ecclesiastical law, including service to the Tribunal offices of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and the Archdiocese of Chicago. He served as judicial vicar for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee for two six-year terms. Until his appointment as Auxiliary Bishop, he was also adjunct professor of canon law studies at Marquette University Law School, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Sacred Heart Seminary, Hales Corners, Wisconsin. He is currently an adjunct professor of canon law at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois, where he has taught since 1997. He is vice president of the board of the Black Catholic Congress and is a member of several USCCB committees, including the committee on African American Catholics. In 2010, Cardinal Francis George appointed Bishop Perry Postulator for the Cause for declared Sainthood of Venerable Father Augustus Tolton, the first priest of African descent in the United States.

Dr. Paul G. Monson

Paul G. Monson is Vice President of Intellectual Formation & Academic Dean at Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology (Wisconsin), where he also serves as Associate Professor of Church History. He received his B.A. in Catholic Studies from the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) and his Ph.D. in Historical Theology from Marquette University. His research focuses on the intersection of theology, history, and culture in American Catholicism. He has published over a dozen articles and book chapters, with appearances in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, American Catholic Studies, and US Catholic Historian. His current book project, “Sitting Bull’s Monk,” examines the missionary life of America’s first Swiss-Benedictine abbot, Martin Marty, OSB (1834–1896). He is a member of the American Catholic Historical Association and the Academy of Catholic Theology. He also serves as secretary and board member of the Wethersfield Institute.

Dr. Kathleen Burk

Kathleen Burk holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the Institute of Philosophic Studies at the University of Dallas. After a long career in higher education, serving as faculty, dean, administrator, and executive director of a nonprofit professional organization, Dr. Burk consults, writes, edits, and volunteers for causes in the humanities and liberal arts.