The Conciliar Sect’s New Shrine: Augustus Tolton and the Religion of Heroic Naturalism
The National Catholic Register portal reports that the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois announced the establishment of a shrine dedicated to “Venerable” Augustus Tolton, the first African American Catholic priest born in the United States, at the former St. Boniface Church in Quincy, Illinois. Bishop Thomas Paprocki praised Tolton’s “quiet and heroic” endurance of trials, while Bishop Joseph Perry, the postulator for Tolton’s sainthood cause, described his perseverance as a “shining example” of how to “grapple with disappointment.” The shrine, estimated to cost $10–12 million, is envisioned as a place of pilgrimage, particularly for seminarians and priests, focusing on prayers for “reconciliation between enemies” and “harmony among peoples.” Tolton, born into slavery in 1854, was ordained in Rome in 1886 after no U.S. seminary would accept him, and died in Chicago in 1897. Pope Francis declared him “Venerable” in 2019. This announcement, laden with the conciliar sect’s characteristic naturalistic and socially activist rhetoric, exposes not a genuine promotion of Catholic holiness, but rather the instrumentalization of a historical figure to advance the neo-church’s agenda of horizontal, worldly reconciliation, entirely divorced from the supernatural order and the true hierarchy of virtues.