Published July 1, 2012
By Reg Ankrom
The body of the Rev. Peter
McGirr is buried in a small plot in Bloomfield Cemetery nine miles north of
Quincy. Rising above the grave is a granite obelisk with a crowning crucifix.
Its shadow each day marks Father McGirr’s resting place with the same sign of
the cross with which he blessed his flock. It would be a quiet place but for
the whispers of winds that race up the knoll and through the grass like giggling
children who disappear in the descent on the other side.
There are few pilgrims these days to Father McGirr’s grave.
But he chose his surroundings to be as close in death as he was in life to his
several Irish relatives and friends in the cemetery he established. It was
developed adjacent to St. Joseph Catholic Church, a mission church he founded
in 1871 while pastor of St. Peter Catholic Church in Quincy. Names of Ireland
are etched in the stones around him: Dempsey, Egan, Gunn, Hirty, Kelly, Kirk,
McElroy, McGovern, McLaughlin, the brothers and sisters of McGirr and others.
For most who are buried on this emerald green hillside, life
ended at the turn of the 19th century. The inscription carved into the priest’s
monument indicates the tasks to which he devoted himself on earth ended in
March 1893.
Father Peter McGirr might have entered eternity as most do,
with collections of sorrows and joys — “long-suffering” or grace as a successor
priest calls them — that life brings to all. But McGirr was a strong priest.
It is his strength that history particularly remembers, his strength in a day
of discrimination when he sheltered and encouraged one of the least of his
flock in Quincy, a black youngster named John Augustine Tolton. McGirr led
Tolton to his vocation, a calling in which he became the nation’s first
African-American Catholic priest and that put him today on a journey to
sainthood.
McGirr was born June 29, 1833, in County Tyrone, Ireland. He
was the third boy in a close family of ardent Catholics, and his eight brothers
and sisters held the red-headed, freckle-faced boy to high standards in school.
The people of his village of Fintona, a village twice as old as the Catholic Church
itself, believed it the destiny of Peter McGirr, who had been named for a
saint, to be a priest.
McGirr’s family was among the nearly 1 million people that
famine and disease drove from Ireland between 1845 and 1852. McGirr, 15, and
two older brothers left first, arriving in New York City in 1848. McGirr was
sent on to Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., and would continue graduate
studies at a seminary in Montreal, Canada. His brothers stayed in New York
City. In two years they had saved enough of their earnings to bring the rest of
the McGirr family to America. They chose to move to Bloomfield, following
several other Irish settlers into the thriving community northeast of
Quincy. Like the others, the McGirr family became farmers.
Ordained a priest at Alton Cathedral in 1861, Father McGirr
was assigned to Pittsfield. Within months he was appointed pastor of St.
Lawrence O’Toole Church, which he soon would rename for his patron St. Peter.
In Quincy he built a school, a new church and rectory, and the mission church
and cemetery on 2.5 acres at Bloomfield.
Although McGirr had suffered privation in Ireland and
separation from his family, he did not know suffering like the child to whom he
served as patron. Augustine Tolton by circumstance alone had been born into a
family of slaves in Ralls County, Mo. In an undated interview, the late Adams
County historian Father Landry Genosky wrote that slave owners of the time “saw
to their slaves’ salvations, even if they didn’t educate them or make it
possible for them to be free.” Father Landry was a well-known professor at
Quincy College who edited the massive People’s History of Quincy and Adams
County.
Father Landry said it was traditional in the Stephen
Elliott family, which owned the Tolton children and their mother Martha
Jane, for the youngest girl in the family to instruct the slaves in their
religion. The Elliotts were Catholic, and each of the Tolton children, Charles,
John Augustine and Anne, were baptized in St. Peter Catholic Church in Brush
Creek, Mo.
After Martha Tolton spirited her children from Missouri and
slavery to freedom (Elliott family tradition is that they were given their
freedom) in Quincy in 1860, she and her children joined other black Catholics
in attending St. Boniface Church. The son Charles died of pneumonia in 1861.
The Rev. Herman Schaeffermeyer enrolled Augustine in St. Boniface School
for the three-month term in 1865. But insults and threats by parents to
withdraw their children from the school led to Augustine’s departure, much to
the dismay of Father Schaeffermeyer.
There was little welcome for the Tolton family when
subsequently they began attending St. Peter, whose parish family had grown to
1,500 under Father McGirr’s pastorate. While building his parish, McGirr “did
his best to break down the clannish, nationalistic attitude of his compatriots
and welcomed non-Irish families to the parish,” wrote Sister Caroline Hemeseth
in her biography of Tolton, “From Slave to Priest.” McGirr’s admonition that
“Christ died for all” consoled his black parishioners and silenced others,
Hemeseth wrote.
McGirr enrolled John Augustine in St. Peter School and
employed him as a janitor. McGirr instructed Tolton, gave him his first Holy
Communion and had him serve the church as an altar boy. Noting the piety in his
young charge, McGirr asked Tolton if he wanted to become a priest. It launched
John Augustine’s journey, a difficult one. But Tolton had known few easy ones.
McGirr was among several priests who sought to get John
Augustine admitted to a seminary in the United States. Denied admission to all
of them, Tolton enrolled at St. Francis Solanus College in Quincy in 1878. It
was there he met the Rev. Michael Richardt, a Franciscan priest, with whom
Father McGirr found the way to aid Tolton on his journey to become a priest.
McGirr and Richardt were successful in winning appointment
for Tolton to the Propaganda in Rome, a missionary training center, and getting
the Diocese of Alton to pay for it. In Rome on April 24, 1886, at the age of
34, Tolton was ordained a Catholic priest. Father McGirr led the thousands who greeted him on his return to Quincy on July 17.
Father Tolton said the 9 a.m. Mass at St. Boniface Church the
next day. Father McGirr preached the sermon, a homily about a black child’s
path to the priesthood.
Reg Ankrom is executive director of the Historical Society.
He is a member of several history-related organizations, the author of a
history of Stephen A. Douglas and a frequent speaker on pre-Civil War history.
Sources
Bauer, Rev. Roy.
“They Called Him Father Gus: The Life and Times of Augustine Tolton, First
Black Priest in the U.S.A.” Quincy, Illinois: St. Peter Parish.
“Bloomfield
Cemetery.” Handout provided during dedication of plaque at Bloomfield
Cemetery July 24, 1977. MS9, Adams County–Mendon, Historical Society of Quincy
and Adams County (HSQAC).
Brush Creek’s Ebony
Dream: Father Augustus Tolton, 1854-1897. Ewing, Missouri: Hall’s Mill Farm,
1986.
“Father Augustus
Tolton, 1854-1897.” Office of the Cardinal, Archdiocese of Chicago, 2010.
MS920, Tolton, Rev. Augustine, 1854-1897, HSQAC.
Frey, Mrs. Gerald. 1974
interview by the Rev. Landry Genosky, undated. MM27, HSQAC.
Hemeseth, Caroline. From
Slave to Priest: A Biography of the Rev. Augustine Tolton (1854-1897), First
Afro-American Priest of the United States. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press,
1973.
Zurbonsen, A. Clerical
Bead Roll of the Diocese of Alton, Illinois. Quincy, Illinois: Jost &
Kiefer Printing Co., 1918.
