Birmingham, Ala., Dec 16, 2019 / 08:01 pm (CNA).- EWTN will release Wednesday a short film on the early life of Venerable John Augustus Tolton – the first African American priest – whose cause for canonization progressed in June.
“ACROSS: The Father Tolton Movie” will debut 10 p.m. ET Dec. 18 on EWTN. It will showcase the boyhood story of Tolton and his journey from a Missouri slave to a freeman in Illinois.
Prior to the film, a discussion will be held by Nashville filmmaker Christopher Foley, the movie’s writer and director, and Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Perry of Chicago, the diocesan postulator for Tolton’s sainthood cause. This will take place at 8 p.m. with host Father Mitch Pacwa.
The 36-minute film is in preparation for a full-length feature, which Foley will start producing this summer. He told CNA that the movie is called ACROSS for two reasons – the cross that Tolton carried, and the obstacles he had to conquer.
“He had to go across the ocean to get ordained. He had to get across the Mississippi River to escape slavery, but he had to carry a cross his entire life because he stood out and was different,” he said.
“He accepted that and great things came out of it. He made so many converts, and he just sets such a great example for everybody through his perseverance.”
Tolton was born into slavery in Monroe County, Missouri, in 1854. During the Civil War, Tolton and his family escaped slavery.
The young Tolton entered St. Peter’s Catholic School in Quincy, Illinois, with the help of the school’s pastor, Fr. Peter McGirr. The priest went on to baptize Tolton, instruct him for his first Holy Communion, and recognize his vocation to the priesthood.
Because of his ethnicity no American seminary would accept Tolton, so he studied for the priesthood in Rome. When Father Tolton returned to the U.S. after his ordination in 1889, thousands of people lined the streets to greet him. A brass band played hymns, and black and white people processed together into the local church.
Father Tolton was the first African American to be ordained a priest. He served for three years at a parish in Quincy before moving to Chicago to start a parish for black Catholics, St. Monica’s, where he remained until his death in 1897.
Foley said the film will explore Tolton’s family dynamic and his childhood. He said Tolton’s mother and siblings were owned by the Elliot family and his father was owned by the neighboring Hagar family. Tolton’s entire family lived in a cabin between the two properties.
“Both families of the owners were Catholic and they made sure that all of their slaves were baptized, which is kind of a weird dichotomy that they could believe in slavery but at the same time understand that these are souls that need to be baptized.”
In the movie, Peter leaves the family to join the Union Army when Tolton is 10 years old. Sometime afterward, Tolton convinces his mother and siblings to flee to the north. They are then shown outrunning slave-catchers and Confederate soldiers, eventually crossing the Mississippi River to achieve their freedom.
Foley said, while the country continues to face issues of racial inequality, the film has come at the proper time. He said Tolton overcame hatred with acts of love.
“We see a lot of racial angst and discord in our country now. It was so much different back then and worse, but the solution is the same,” he told CNA. “He met hatred and discrimination with love.”
“It was interesting because he was actually one of the reasons he was kind of ousted from his hometown of Quincy. He was told to minister just to black people in Quincy, Illinois and white people started coming to his church and he was fine with that. He welcomed everyone, but that raised the ire of other people. He believed that there’s no hierarchy of races.”
He said the movie has also come at a time of great difficulty in the Church, including the clergy sex abuse scandal. Similarly, he said the story will highlight the Church’s overall good even among villainous men.
“One of our bad guys is a priest who was a racist, but that doesn’t change the goal and mission of the church as being good,” he said.
“The majority of her priests are good, holy men, like Father Tolton. We need to kind of hold up this example now in the midst of these scandals and say, ‘Hey, most priests are more like Father Tolton than the ones that are making the headlines. We need to raise up those good stories.”
Pope Francis recognized the heroic virtue of Fr. Tolton June 12, making him “venerable”.
In a recent newsletter, Bishop Perry said Tolton is a model of civil rights and overcoming racial adversity with Christian virtues.
“Father Tolton shows us Christians how to get through to the Kingdom, surviving the apparent contradictions of life with our faith, hope and love intact,” said Perry.
“The unfinished business of racial reconciliation in America is inspired by Father Tolton’s sense of openness to walk amidst and serve both black and white at a time, post Civil War-Reconstruction, socially not yet ripe for interaction between the races. He was ahead of his time in leading both black and white under the roof of his Church while being resented for it by pockets of Church and society of his time.”
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According to the report, the settlements will be funded through the diocese’s self-insurance program, a loan, and “contributions from other religious orders, where appropriate.”
“The settlements will not come from parish or school assets, the annual diocesan appeal, donor restricted contributions, or restricted endowments, the report states.”
With all the “confession, reconciliation, and repair” going on in the Diocese of Richmond, it seems that transparency and simple honesty did not make the list. The Diocese’s “self-insurance program” is a fancy way of saying it is funded by, wait for it, the unrestricted contributions of parishioners. The “loan” will be paid, principal and interest by, wait for it, yes, that’s right, the unrestricted contributions of parishioners. Why will the payments not come from “parish or school assets, the annual diocesan appeal, donor restricted contributions, or restricted endowments”? Because these assets don’t belong to the Diocese but to the separate civil and/or canonical legal entities involved.
The Diocese’s verbal legerdemain leaves me very skeptical that it is going to “meet victim survivors with support and compassion”. If that were the case, there never would have been 50+ rape or sexual abuse victims to begin with. I have had significant experience, professional and personal, with Catholic dioceses throughout the U.S. for over 35 years on sexual abuse matters. The experience has been a bitter one, with “support and compassion” present primarily in public relations releases like the one here that are intended to manipulate the credulity and trust of the victims and anesthetize the laity into believing the problem has been solved. It hasn’t. The Catholic Church in this country is massively corrupt and has been for decades and even today is heavily infiltrated by homosexuals at all levels up to and including the highest.
Look closely at the inscription on the architrave shown in this photograph:
https://travel.sygic.com/en/poi/cathedral-of-the-sacred-heart-poi:15150519
The Gilded Age New York millionaire Thomas Fortune Ryan who built this cathedral single-handedly knew what was most important. Sadly, the interior of this magnificent building has been vandalized by Vatican II liturgical Nazi’s and bears little resemblance to its original conception and design, a paradigm of the Catholic Church in Richmond and this country, if not the world.
Charles Flynn,
Exactly. Thank you for sharing that link.
In the end, money that could have been spent on worthwhile endeavors gets spent on attempting to fix injustices that should never have happened, and in many cases, most likely did not happen. The way these things are often described, it almost sounds as though they printed the money. The bottom line is that it has to come from somewhere, and it doesn’t matter if it comes from one’s front pocket, back pocket, left pocket, or right pocket.
Yes, I agree with you that the squandering of $4 billion by U.S. Catholic bishops, let alone the ravaged lives of innumerable Catholics, victims and loved ones, is a sordid tragedy of horrendous proportions, regardless of who pays for it. The even uglier reality is that the Satanic evil that underlies it has not diminished; in fact, it has metastasized. For over 35 years I have said that stories like this will continue as long as the priesthood continues to be a safe harbor for homosexuals and other psycho-sexual deviates. Make no mistake, they make up the predominant share of priests in today’s ape-Church.