Book Notes - From Slave to Priest
Biography of Venerable Augustus Tolton, written in the context of the US Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s.
Working through the TBR pile, just finished up From Slave to Priest: The Inspirational Story of Father Augustine Tolton (1854-1897). Originally published in 1973, it’s since been picked up by Ignatius Press.
What I especially like: The telling of Venerable Augustus Tolton’s life and legacy is detailed enough that you get a stark view into just how complicated was racism in his era, and in the decades after his passing.
I don’t use “complicated” as a euphemism here. Imagine a world where a local priest (Fr. Tolton) is so popular he’s driving his religious superior mad with envy because the white Catholics are attending and funding the newly-created black parish instead of their own, leading to no end of draconian pronouncements and general misery in an effort to get everyone re-segregated — but also that same openly-racist supervisor at one point explicitly gives Fr. Tolton permission to marry a young white couple at the black parish when no one other clergy in town will do it out of fear of the bride’s wealthy, powerful, and disapproving mother.
The whole book is chock full of those kinds of roller coasters. Phenomenal view into the mindset of the era.
And of course Fr. Tolton’s steadfastness in his mission despite the unrelenting flow of obstacles to his vocation are a helpful perspective on modern-day dysfunction in the Church, or wherever else humans are found.
Recommended. I don’t recall anything of concern for anyone who’s mature enough to handle the topic of slavery and all its associated evils (nothing graphic), but the text itself is written more for an adult audience, for certain.
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