Prayer for the Canonization of Father Augustus Tolton

This is the official prayer for the canonization of Father Augustus Tolton, composed for his cause by the Archdiocese of Chicago. Like other prayers of its kind, it does not address a canonized saint; it asks God to glorify His servant — to grant, if it be His Will, a favor through Father Tolton's intercession, so that answered prayers might serve as signs advancing his cause. Its language is steeped in his own story: a life of "suffering service" offered "in times of contradiction," seen "through the prism of Your Son's passion and death."

Augustus Tolton (1854–1897) is recognized as the first Catholic priest in the United States publicly known to be African-American. He was born into slavery in Missouri in 1854. During the Civil War his mother carried her children to freedom, crossing the Mississippi River into Quincy, Illinois — a flight under fire that became the stuff of legend in his family.

Called to the priesthood, he was refused by the American seminaries to which he applied on account of his race. So he was sent to study in Rome, at the college of the Propaganda Fide, and was ordained in Rome in 1886. He expected to be sent to the African missions; instead he was sent back to America, to labor among his own people. He served first in Quincy and then in Chicago, where he gathered and built up St. Monica's parish for the city's Black Catholics, revered as a preacher and a shepherd of the poor.

Worn out by his labors, Father Tolton died in Chicago in 1897, at only forty-three, collapsing during a savage heat wave. His holiness was never forgotten. His cause for canonization was opened in 2010, and he was given the title Servant of God; on 12 June 2019, Pope Francis declared him Venerable, recognizing his heroic virtue. As with every cause still underway, the Church addresses him as "servant" and prays — she does not presume — that God will one day glorify him upon the altars.

Two verses stand behind this prayer. The first is St. Paul’s, and the Church has long read it of those who suffer for the Body: “Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church” (Col. 1:24). Father Tolton was refused by every seminary in the United States and had to be sent to Rome to be ordained; he came back to serve the people who had been told he could not serve them. The second verse is the one a cause for canonization must keep in front of it, lest it become a monument to a man rather than to God: “Not to us, O Lord, not to us; but to thy name give glory” (Ps. 113:9).