Venerable Fr. Tolton ministered briefly in Ewing parish
As one of the 20 priests who sang during the Mass celebrating the placement of the cornerstone in the first Queen of Peace Church in Ewing on June 6, 1889, the nation’s first recognizably Black Catholic priest had returned to promote unity.
Venerable Father Augustus Tolton (1854-97), a former slave from Monroe County, Missouri, who had been baptized in St. Peter Church in Brush Creek, had been ordained in Rome in 1886 and was ministering in Quincy, Illinois, where he had grown up after escaping with his family during the Civil War.
A 1919 article in the Lewis County Journal newspaper included recollections of Emmett Boudreau, who moved to what is now Ewing in 1884.
Franciscan priests from Quincy traveled to Ewing each Sunday to offer Mass.
Mr. Boudreau said German Catholics and Irish Catholics in the area didn’t always get along well in the community’s early days.
“When an Irish priest was sent out here, the German people were unhappy, and vice-versa,” he recalled.
One Sunday, the visiting priest was Fr. Tolton, who was neither.
“Needless to say,” Mr. Boudreau recounted, “the congregation was amazed and asked how long he would be coming.”
The priest’s reply: “Until you settle your differences.”
Mr. Boudreau said it only took the venerable cleric about two weeks to help parishioners become of one heart and one soul.
Fr. Tolton died of heat exhaustion while ministering in Chicago in 1897, at age 43.
The Chicago archdiocese in 2011 opened an official cause for having him declared a saint.
In 2019, Pope Francis declared that Fr. Tolton had exhibited heroic virtue throughout his life, and bestowed on him the title “Venerable,” an important step in the sainthood cause.
Aspects of his ministry are depicted in three stained glass windows created in 2023 for the renovated Cathedral of St. Joseph in Jefferson City.
