AME Church History and Beliefs

1. What the AME Church Is

The African Methodist Episcopal Church is a Wesleyan denomination governed by bishops, organized at Philadelphia in April 1816 under Richard Allen, and the first independent Black denomination founded in the United States. Its doctrine is standard Methodism: the Apostles' Creed, the Twenty-Five Articles of Religion that John Wesley abridged from the Anglican articles, justification by faith, the new birth, sanctification, and two sacraments in baptism and the Lord's Supper. Its origin is what sets it apart, because it exists as a separate body only because Black Methodists in Philadelphia were segregated inside a church they had helped to pay for.

That sentence is the whole story in miniature, and it is worth saying slowly. Richard Allen did not leave Methodism. He never repudiated a single Methodist doctrine, he kept the Methodist Discipline almost word for word, he kept the class meetings, the itinerant preachers and the hymnody, and he was ordained by Francis Asbury, the founding bishop of American Methodism. The AME Church was built by men who agreed with the Methodist Episcopal Church about God and disagreed with it about where they were allowed to kneel.

The word "African" in the name

The founders chose the word deliberately in a period when it carried a claim. The Free African Society, the African Church of Philadelphia, the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas and the African Methodist Episcopal Church all used the term to assert a people and a lineage at a moment when American law and American churches were denying both. "Methodist" names the doctrine and the discipline. "Episcopal" names the government by bishops. "African" names who built it and why they had to.

Where it stands among the denominations

The AME Church is one of three historically Black Methodist bodies that outsiders regularly merge into one. The African Methodist Episcopal Church came out of Philadelphia in 1816. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church came out of New York City and organized separately in 1821 and 1822. The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church was organized at Jackson, Tennessee, in 1870. They share doctrine, they share the Methodist structure, they have never merged, and section 6 sets the three side by side. For where Methodism itself sits in the wider Christian family, see our overview of the Christian denominations and how they relate.

2. The Walkout at St. George's

Richard Allen and Absalom Jones led Black worshippers out of St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia after trustees ordered them to move during prayer and pulled Absalom Jones up from his knees before he had finished praying. Allen told the story himself in the memoir published after his death, and the detail he chose to preserve is the interruption of a man at prayer. The dispute was about seating, and the offence was against worship.

Richard Allen was born enslaved in Philadelphia in 1760 and sold as a boy, with his mother and siblings, to a farmer named Stokeley Sturgis in Delaware. He was converted under Methodist preaching in his teens, joined a Methodist class, and persuaded Sturgis to let him purchase his freedom, which he completed around 1780 by hauling wood, working at a brickyard and driving a salt wagon during the Revolutionary War. He then rode as a preacher on the Methodist circuits, and in 1786 he came to Philadelphia and began preaching at St. George's, sometimes at five in the morning so as not to disturb the regular services.

His preaching worked. Black attendance at St. George's grew substantially, and Black members contributed money toward the building's improvement, including the gallery. The trustees responded by deciding where those members could sit. On the Sunday in question the Black worshippers went to their usual places, were told these were now reserved, and were physically moved while kneeling. Allen wrote that they left the building in a body and did not return.

James wrote those lines about a congregation assigning seats by wealth. The apostolic Church already knew that the seating plan of an assembly is a doctrinal statement, and that a church which sorts the baptized by any worldly category has contradicted its own gospel before the sermon begins. St. George's did in 1790s Philadelphia what James forbade in the first century.

The date is contested, and the fact is not

Allen dated the incident to 1787. Historians of early Black Philadelphia have argued for 1792 or 1793 instead, largely on the evidence of when the gallery at St. George's was actually built, since Allen's account places the confrontation there. The Free African Society was certainly founded in April 1787, and Allen may have telescoped several years of accumulating grievance into one remembered Sunday. Nothing in the dispute over the year touches what happened or why it mattered.

The 1792 and 1793 datings come from later historians working from Philadelphia church and building records rather than from any contemporary account contradicting Allen. Allen's own narrative, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, was published in 1833, two years after his death, and remains the primary source for the incident.

Absalom Jones took the other road

Allen and Jones walked out together and then parted over which church to build. The majority wanted an Episcopal congregation, and Jones led them, founding the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas and being ordained a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1802, the first Black man to receive that ordination in that body. Allen refused to leave Methodism, telling his friends that Methodist preaching was what had converted him and what the plain people could understand. The two remained allies, organized Philadelphia's Black nurses and gravediggers together during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, and defended their community in print afterwards when a pamphleteer accused it of profiteering. On the Episcopal tradition Jones entered, see our guide to the Episcopal Church in the United States.

3. From the Free African Society to 1816

The AME Church took nearly thirty years to move from a mutual aid society to a denomination, and every step was contested in a courtroom or a conference. Allen and Jones founded the Free African Society in Philadelphia in April 1787 as a benevolent association: dues, sick relief, burial funds, moral discipline and a place for free Black Philadelphians to organize themselves. It was the seedbed of both churches that followed.

Bethel, 1794

Allen bought a former blacksmith's shop, had it hauled to a lot he owned at Sixth and Lombard Streets, and opened it as Bethel. Francis Asbury dedicated the building in July 1794. Bethel remained legally inside the Methodist Episcopal Church, served by white elders sent from St. George's, and this arrangement is what produced the next twenty years of conflict. Asbury ordained Allen a deacon in 1799, making him the first Black man ordained in American Methodism.

The fight over the deed

The elders of St. George's claimed authority over Bethel's property, its pulpit and its collections. Bethel's members answered by amending their charter in 1807 with a document known as the African Supplement, which vested control of the building and the choice of preachers in the congregation's own trustees. The dispute ran for years, involved an attempt to sell the building at auction, and ended at the start of 1816 when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that Bethel belonged to its congregation. The AME Church was born in a property case, which is a very ordinary way for a very serious separation to happen.

April 1816

With the court decision in hand, Allen called delegates from congregations facing the same fight. Representatives from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington, Salem in New Jersey and Attleborough in Pennsylvania met in Philadelphia in April 1816 and resolved to become one connection, adopting the Methodist Discipline as their own with the necessary changes. Daniel Coker of Baltimore was elected bishop first and stood aside the following day. Richard Allen was consecrated bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with Absalom Jones among those who laid hands on him. Allen served until his death in 1831 and is buried in the crypt of Mother Bethel, which still stands on the lot he bought.

What happened after the Civil War

Southern states had suppressed independent Black churches for decades, so the AME Church entered the South in force only after emancipation. Bishop Daniel Payne returned to Charleston in 1865 to reorganize the work there, and AME missionaries followed the Union armies and then the freedmen's settlements across the South. Membership multiplied many times over within two decades, the denomination planted schools alongside its churches, and it later extended into West and Southern Africa and the Caribbean, where it remains. For the wider story of Christianity's growth on that continent, see our guide to Christianity in Africa, and for the independent churches founded there see African Initiated Churches.

4. What the AME Church Believes

AME doctrine is Wesleyan Methodism, held in the form John Wesley gave it and kept with unusual conservatism. The denomination's standards are the Apostles' Creed, the Twenty-Five Articles of Religion, the Book of Discipline, and Wesley's own sermons and Notes on the New Testament as the historic doctrinal touchstone of Methodism. An AME congregation confesses the Trinity, the Incarnation, the atoning death and bodily resurrection of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting.

The Twenty-Five Articles

John Wesley took the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles, cut them to twenty-four and sent them to American Methodists in 1784, who added one on the civil authority of the United States. The AME Church adopted them in 1816 substantially unchanged. They affirm the Trinity and the two natures of Christ, the sufficiency of Scripture for salvation, original sin, free will restored by grace, justification by faith alone, good works as the fruit of faith, and the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. They also carry the Reformation-era denials that Wesley inherited from the Anglican articles, rejecting purgatory, the invocation of saints, worship in a language the people do not understand, and transubstantiation. A Catholic reader should know those articles are in the AME standards and should read them as sixteenth-century English polemic carried forward by inheritance rather than as anything the AME Church invented.

Grace, free will and assurance

The Wesleyan account of salvation is Arminian, and it runs in a definite order. Prevenient grace goes before any human choice, reaching a person who is not seeking God and restoring enough freedom to respond. The atonement is universal in scope, offered for every person rather than for a limited elect. Justification comes by faith, received rather than earned. The new birth accompanies it, and the witness of the Spirit gives the believer assurance of adoption, resting on Romans 8:16. Grace can be resisted, and a believer can fall away. Sanctification follows as the actual transformation of the heart, and Wesley taught that perfect love of God and neighbour can be given in this life, a doctrine Methodists debate among themselves and generally hold with pastoral care.

Catholic teaching agrees with a great deal of that. The Council of Trent taught that grace precedes and prepares the will, that no one merits the initial grace of justification, and that free will cooperates with grace rather than being destroyed by it. The Catholic Church rejects the doctrine of a limited atonement as firmly as Wesley did. The differences that remain are about the sacraments, the visible Church and the ordained ministry rather than about whether grace comes first. Our guide to faith and works in Catholic and Protestant teaching works through the justification question in detail, and the 1999 Lutheran and Catholic agreement, which the World Methodist Council formally associated itself with in 2006, is covered in our guide to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.

The sacraments

The AME Church holds two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, and understands both as means of grace rather than as bare signs. Baptism is administered to believers and to the infants of believing parents, by sprinkling, pouring or immersion. The Lord's Supper is celebrated with a real spiritual presence of Christ received by faith, following Wesley and the Anglican tradition behind him, and the AME Discipline retains a communion liturgy close to the Book of Common Prayer. Foot washing and the love feast survive in some congregations as devotional practices without sacramental status.

The Catholic Church recognizes a baptism administered with water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, whoever performs it, so an AME baptism performed that way is valid and is not repeated if the person becomes Catholic. On the Eucharist the two traditions genuinely differ, and the Catholic position turns on the priesthood as much as on the presence, which section 13 takes up. See our guides to baptism and to the Eucharist for the underlying Catholic teaching.

The motto

The AME Church summarizes itself in a line printed on its own materials: God our Father, Christ our Redeemer, the Holy Spirit our Comforter, humankind our family. The last clause is doing theological work. A denomination that came into being because a congregation refused to treat certain believers as family put the correction into its motto, and it is a straightforwardly biblical correction, resting on Acts 10:34-35 and Galatians 3:28.

5. How the AME Church Governs Itself

AME government is the Methodist episcopal system, kept close to the form Asbury and Coke gave American Methodism. Authority runs through conferences rather than through a single office, bishops are elected by the whole denomination rather than appointed from above, and pastors are stationed by bishops rather than called by congregations.

The General Conference

The General Conference is the supreme body of the denomination and meets every four years. It is composed of clergy and lay delegates elected from the annual conferences, it alone can amend the Discipline, and it alone elects bishops and general officers. Between sessions the work is carried by the Council of Bishops, a General Board, and connectional departments for Christian education, missions, publications and church growth. A Judicial Council hears appeals on the interpretation of the Discipline.

Bishops, districts and the itinerancy

AME bishops are elected for life by the General Conference and assigned to episcopal districts, which cover regions of the United States and territories in Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Europe. Assignments to districts rotate. Each district contains annual conferences, each annual conference is divided among presiding elders, and each presiding elder supervises a group of congregations. Pastors are appointed by the bishop, normally year by year, under the itinerant principle Wesley established: a preacher goes where the connection sends him rather than negotiating with a congregation. The system was designed to plant churches quickly across a frontier, and it did.

The lay organizations

Two bodies carry much of the denomination's life. The Women's Missionary Society, organized in the late nineteenth century, funds and staffs mission work at home and abroad, and it has been an organized force in AME giving since its founding. The Lay Organization represents lay members across the connection, holds its own conferences, and exists to keep lay voice in a system governed by bishops. A young adult body named for Richard Allen carries the same function for a younger generation.

6. AME, AME Zion and CME Compared

The three historically Black Methodist denominations are separate churches with separate founders, separate bishops and separate headquarters, and none is a division of another. Confusing them is a routine error, and it appears in print as often as in conversation. The table below fixes the distinctions.

Dates above follow each denomination's own published history and standard reference works on American Methodism. The three bodies report their memberships themselves and those figures are not independently audited, so this guide gives none. Survey research, including the Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study, generally measures the historically Black Protestant tradition as a whole rather than counting these denominations separately.

Why they never merged

Union has been discussed since the 1860s and has failed every time, for reasons that are institutional rather than doctrinal. Each body has its own bishops with lifetime tenure, its own colleges, its own publishing house, its own pension arrangements and its own claim to a founding story. A merger requires someone's bishops to be redundant and someone's founder to become a footnote. The three now cooperate through a Pan-Methodist commission that also includes the United Methodist Church, and in 2012 the participating bodies adopted a full communion agreement recognizing each other's members and ministries. Full communion without merger is a familiar arrangement, and it is the one they have chosen.

7. The AME Zion Church

The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church began in New York City, independently of Philadelphia, among Black members of the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church. They withdrew from John Street's services in 1796 to hold their own meetings, built a chapel they named Zion in 1800, and spent the next twenty years in the same argument Bethel was having: whether a Black congregation could control its own property and ordain its own preachers while remaining inside the Methodist Episcopal Church.

They chose a different endpoint from Allen's. Bethel's people accepted Allen's episcopal consecration and formed a connection under bishops in 1816. Zion's people declined to join Allen, organized their own annual conference in 1821, and in 1822 consecrated James Varick as their first superintendent, a title they used for years before adopting the word bishop. In 1848 the denomination added "Zion" to its legal name specifically to end the confusion with the AME Church, which tells you the confusion is two centuries old.

The Freedom Church

AME Zion is called the Freedom Church because of who belonged to it. Frederick Douglass was licensed as a lay preacher in the AME Zion congregation at New Bedford, Massachusetts, and later credited that pulpit with his first practice at public speaking. Harriet Tubman was an AME Zion member and is connected with the church in Auburn, New York, where she settled. Sojourner Truth was associated with the Zion congregation in New York City. Zion churches served as stations on the Underground Railroad and as meeting halls for abolitionist organizing when no other building in town was available.

Women in orders, first

The AME Zion Church ordained women before any other body in the Methodist family. Julia A. J. Foote was ordained a deacon in 1894, and Mary J. Small was ordained an elder in 1898, which made her the first woman ordained to the full ministry in any Methodist denomination. Both decisions were contested inside the connection and both held. This is the concrete answer when someone asks which of the three moved first.

Where it is now

The AME Zion Church is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, governs through a General Conference and a Board of Bishops on the same quadrennial pattern as the AME Church, and supports Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, along with its theological seminary. It maintains work in West Africa, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and India. Its doctrine is indistinguishable from AME doctrine, which is exactly why the two are confused and exactly why the confusion irritates members of both.

8. The CME Church

The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church was organized at Jackson, Tennessee, in December 1870, and it took a different road to independence from the AME and AME Zion Churches. Its founders were Black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the slaveholding branch that had split from northern Methodism in 1844 over whether a bishop could own human beings. After emancipation those members asked for their own separate church, and the southern conference granted it, transferred property to it, and helped consecrate its first two bishops, William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst.

The denomination was called the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church from 1870 until 1954, when its General Conference changed the word to Christian. The change was made because members had come to find the old term degrading, and the initials were kept so that congregations would not lose their identity.

Why the older bodies were suspicious

AME and AME Zion leaders criticized the new church at its founding, and the criticism was pointed: a denomination organized with the blessing of the former slaveholding church, on property that church conveyed, might be expected to stay quiet about politics. Early CME leaders did counsel caution about political involvement, partly out of conviction that the church's work was spiritual and partly out of realism about what a Black congregation in Mississippi in 1875 could survive. The judgment made from Philadelphia and New York cost the CME Church little in the South, where it grew steadily among rural congregations that already existed.

The caution did not last, and it should not define the denomination. CME congregations and CME colleges were fully engaged in the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, and CME clergy were among its organizers. The founding compromise is a fact about 1870 rather than a description of the church since.

The 1844 split behind it

The CME Church exists because American Methodism broke over slavery a generation before the Civil War. The 1844 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church suspended Bishop James O. Andrew from exercising his office while he held enslaved people, southern delegates refused the ruling, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was constituted the following year. Reunion came in 1939, and the price of it was a segregated structure: Black congregations across the country were placed in a separate non-geographic Central Jurisdiction rather than in the regional jurisdictions where they sat. That arrangement lasted until the United Methodist Church was formed in 1968 and the Central Jurisdiction was abolished. Our guides to Methodism and Wesleyan theology, the Methodist Church split and the United Methodist Church take those events further.

9. Women in the AME Pulpit

The question of women preaching arrived at Richard Allen's door in 1809 and was settled slowly over the next century and a half. Jarena Lee, a member of Bethel, asked Allen for permission to preach and was refused, on the grounds that the Methodist Discipline made no provision for it. She continued to exhort, and in 1819, when a visiting preacher faltered in the pulpit at Bethel and she rose and finished his text, Allen stood before the congregation and publicly affirmed that she was called to preach.

Lee travelled thousands of miles on foot and by coach as an itinerant exhorter, preached to mixed congregations of Black and white hearers, and published her autobiography in 1836, which is among the earliest published narratives by an African American woman. She was never ordained. The AME Church authorized her work without giving her orders, an arrangement that describes the position of Methodist women preachers for a long time afterwards.

The long road to ordination

The AME Church opened ordination to women in stages across the middle of the twentieth century, later than the AME Zion Church, which had ordained Mary J. Small an elder in 1898. In 2000 the AME General Conference elected Vashti Murphy McKenzie, who became the first woman to serve as a bishop in the denomination's history and was assigned to episcopal work in southern Africa. Women now serve at every level of AME ministry, including as presiding elders and general officers.

Where Catholic teaching differs, and where it does not

The Catholic Church does not ordain women to the priesthood or the episcopate, and John Paul II stated in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that the Church has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women. That is a real difference from AME practice and it is not going to be negotiated away in a paragraph. What Catholic teaching does not hold, and has never held, is that women lack the calling, the gifts or the standing to teach the faith with authority. Catholics who want to see what the Church actually says about women who preached, argued, reformed and were named Doctors of the Church can read our guide to the saints and how the Church honours them, and the tradition running from Catherine of Siena to Teresa of Ávila to Thérèse of Lisieux.

Jarena Lee argued her own case from Scripture, and the argument she made is worth reading on its own terms. She asked why, if Christ died for the whole human race, a woman could not tell people so, and she pointed to Mary Magdalene as the first person sent to announce the resurrection. That last point is Catholic doctrine. The Church has called Mary Magdalene the apostle to the apostles since the Middle Ages, and in 2016 her memorial was raised to a feast for that reason.

10. Schools, Presses and Institutions

The AME Church built its own institutions early and kept building them, because its members were excluded from the ones that already existed. A denomination whose members were barred from colleges founded colleges, and a denomination whose members were unwelcome in the press founded newspapers.

Wilberforce University

Wilberforce University in Ohio was established in 1856 and was struggling by the Civil War. The AME Church purchased it in 1863 under the leadership of Daniel Alexander Payne, who became its president, making Wilberforce the first college in the United States owned and operated by African Americans and Payne the first African American college president. Payne had been born free in Charleston, had run a school there until South Carolina outlawed the teaching of Black children, had been ordained a Lutheran minister and then joined the AME Church, and was elected bishop in 1852. He wrote the denomination's first history, insisted on an educated clergy against considerable resistance, and pushed the AME Church toward formal theological training. Payne Theological Seminary carries his name.

The Christian Recorder

The AME Church has published a denominational newspaper continuously since the middle of the nineteenth century under the name The Christian Recorder, which grew out of an earlier AME paper of the 1840s. During the Civil War it carried letters from Black soldiers, notices from families searching for relatives sold away under slavery, and the denomination's own arguments about emancipation and Reconstruction. It is among the oldest continuously published periodicals produced by African Americans, and historians use its files as a primary source for nineteenth-century Black life. The AME Church Review, a quarterly of longer essays, followed in 1884 under Benjamin Tucker Tanner.

The claim about the Recorder's longevity is the denomination's own and is repeated in standard reference works on the Black press; this guide states it without a numerical ranking because the continuity of nineteenth-century titles is genuinely disputed by historians of journalism.

Colleges across the connection

The three denominations founded and still support a set of historically Black colleges: the AME Church's institutions include Wilberforce and Payne Theological Seminary in Ohio, along with colleges founded in the South after the Civil War; the AME Zion Church supports Livingstone College and Hood Theological Seminary in North Carolina; the CME Church supports Lane College in Tennessee, Miles College in Alabama, Texas College, and shares in the founding of Paine College in Georgia. These schools were built by congregations that took up collections for them out of very small incomes, which is the practical meaning of the connectional system.

11. Emanuel AME in Charleston

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, describes itself as the oldest AME congregation in the American South, and its history shows what the denomination has cost the people who built it. The record runs from 1822 to 2015 and it is not finished.

1822

Black Methodists in Charleston withdrew from a white congregation in 1817 over a burial ground dispute and formed an African church affiliated with Allen's new connection, under Morris Brown, who later became the second bishop of the AME Church. The congregation grew quickly and the city authorities harassed it continually, arresting members for holding services after dark and for teaching literacy.

In 1822 Charleston authorities alleged a large slave insurrection plot led by Denmark Vesey, a free Black carpenter who had bought his freedom with lottery winnings and who was a class leader in that congregation. Vesey and dozens of others were tried in a closed court and executed. The African church was blamed, its building was destroyed, and independent Black worship in Charleston was suppressed. Historians continue to argue about the scale of the alleged plot and about how much of the evidence was produced by coerced testimony. What is not in dispute is what the city did to the church.

1865 and after

The congregation reorganized openly after the Civil War, took the name Emanuel, and built on Calhoun Street. It hosted Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr., served as an organizing centre in the civil rights years, and produced clergy who served in public office.

2015

On 17 June 2015 a gunman was welcomed into a Wednesday evening Bible study at Emanuel AME, sat with the group for the better part of an hour, and then murdered nine people, among them the senior pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was also a South Carolina state senator. The congregation held worship in the same building that Sunday. At the bond hearing, family members of the dead addressed the killer directly and spoke words of forgiveness, which was reported around the world and which many Christians found difficult to hear without flinching.

Revelation's picture of the redeemed is explicitly multinational and it is a single assembly standing in one place. That is the end toward which the Church is moving, and a congregation that segregated its gallery in Philadelphia, or its pews in a Catholic parish in Louisiana, was rehearsing the opposite. Emanuel AME has been paying for the difference for two hundred years.

12. Segregation in Catholic Parishes

American Catholic parishes practised the same segregation that produced the AME Church, and Catholic institutions held enslaved people. A page that recounts the walkout from St. George's and then says nothing about what was happening at Catholic altars in the same decades would be dishonest, and the Catholic Church in the United States has itself said so in writing.

What the practice looked like

Black Catholics were seated in back pews, side aisles and galleries. They were required in many parishes to receive communion after the white congregation had finished. Separate national parishes were established for them, sometimes at their own request as a refuge and sometimes as a means of removing them from a shared building. Catholic schools excluded them. Seminaries refused them. Some Catholic cemeteries buried them apart.

Slaveholding

Catholic dioceses, parishes, religious orders and colleges in the United States owned enslaved people and financed themselves from their labour. The best-documented case is the sale in 1838 of 272 enslaved men, women and children by the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus to plantations in Louisiana, arranged in part to relieve the debts of Georgetown College. Descendants of those families have been identified, and Georgetown and the Jesuits have since made public acknowledgements and financial commitments. Other orders and dioceses have opened comparable inquiries into their own records.

Augustus Tolton

Augustus Tolton was born enslaved in Missouri in 1854. His mother escaped with her children across the Mississippi into Illinois during the Civil War. He was refused admission by every American seminary he applied to, was sent instead to the Urban College of the Propaganda Fide in Rome, and was ordained there in 1886, expecting to be sent to Africa. He was sent back to Illinois. He served in Quincy under a pastor who obstructed him, moved to Chicago, built St. Monica's parish for Black Catholics, and died of heatstroke in 1897 at forty-three. His cause for canonization was opened in 2010 and Pope Francis declared him Venerable in 2019.

Tolton is the plain answer to anyone who imagines that Catholic parishes were exempt from what St. George's did. Two Black brothers, James Augustine Healy and Patrick Francis Healy, were ordained decades earlier and rose to be a bishop and a university president respectively, and both were of mixed parentage and were generally taken for white. Tolton was the first American priest publicly known to be Black, and his own country's seminaries had all turned him away.

Black Catholics who built anyway

Mary Elizabeth Lange founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore in 1829, the first religious congregation of women of African descent in the United States, and opened a school for Black children a generation before emancipation. Henriette Delille founded the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans in 1842, teaching and nursing enslaved people in a city that forbade much of it. Pierre Toussaint, born enslaved in Haiti and brought to New York, funded an orphanage and a church out of his earnings as a hairdresser. Daniel Rudd, a Catholic layman and newspaper editor, convened the first Congress of Black Catholics in Washington in 1889. Julia Greeley in Denver and Sister Thea Bowman in Mississippi carried the same work into the twentieth century, and Bowman addressed the United States bishops in 1989 and told them what their own parishes still felt like. Causes for canonization are open for Lange, Delille, Toussaint, Greeley and Bowman.

What the Church did and said

Correction came late and it did come. Archbishop Joseph Ritter desegregated the Catholic schools of St. Louis in 1947 and Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle desegregated them in Washington the following year, both before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Archbishop Joseph Rummel desegregated the Catholic schools of New Orleans in 1962 and excommunicated three prominent Catholics who campaigned against the order. The United States bishops issued the pastoral letter Brothers and Sisters to Us in 1979, naming racism as a sin, and returned to it in 2018 with Open Wide Our Hearts, which acknowledged that the earlier letter had gone largely unread and unimplemented.

The doctrine itself was never in doubt. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches in paragraph 1935 that every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on grounds of sex, race, colour, social condition, language or religion must be curbed and eradicated as contrary to God's design. Our guide to Catholic social teaching and social justice works through that paragraph and the doctrine around it. The failure in the American parishes was a failure to do what the Church taught, and our guide to the scandals in Church history and how Catholics should face them sets out why saying so plainly is the only defensible course.

13. What Catholics and AME Christians Share

Catholics and AME Christians share the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Apostles' Creed, the canonical Scriptures of the New Testament, the atoning death and bodily resurrection of Christ, the primacy of grace, and a mutually recognized baptism. That is a great deal, and it is the reason the Catholic Church calls AME members brothers and sisters in Christ rather than outsiders.

Baptism

The Catholic Church recognizes any baptism performed with water and the Trinitarian formula, whoever administers it. An AME baptism meeting that description is valid, and an AME Christian received into the Catholic Church is not rebaptized. The Second Vatican Council's decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio 3, teaches that those baptized into Christ outside the visible bounds of the Catholic Church are joined to her in a real though imperfect communion.

Where the difference actually lies

The Catholic difficulty lies with holy orders, and it leaves AME worship, AME preaching and AME holiness untouched. Catholic teaching holds that the ministerial priesthood is a sacrament transmitted through bishops in apostolic succession, and it does not recognize that succession in the Methodist ministry, since Wesley's ordinations were performed by a presbyter rather than by a bishop and the line proceeds from there. Unitatis Redintegratio 22 states the consequence: the ecclesial communities separated from Rome that have not preserved the sacrament of orders have not preserved the proper reality of the eucharistic mystery in its fullness. The 2000 declaration Dominus Iesus uses the term ecclesial communities rather than Churches for the same reason.

That language is unwelcome to hear and it should be stated accurately rather than softened into vagueness. Methodists reply that apostolicity is continuity in apostolic faith and mission rather than a mechanical chain of hands, that Wesley acted under pastoral necessity when no bishop would ordain preachers for America, and that the fruit of the ministry is evidence enough. The two positions are genuinely opposed and the international dialogue has been working on them for decades. Our guide to the Catholic priesthood and holy orders sets out the Catholic side, and Catholic and Protestant differences compared covers the wider ground.

The AME column follows the Twenty-Five Articles of Religion and the AME Book of Discipline. The Catholic column follows the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the decrees of Trent and the documents of the Second Vatican Council. Individual congregations and individual believers in both bodies hold their traditions with varying emphasis, and this table states the official positions rather than the range of practice.

14. Where the Conversation Stands

Catholics and Methodists have been in formal international dialogue since 1967, when the World Methodist Council and the Vatican's council for Christian unity began meeting, and they have published a joint report after every five-year cycle since. The AME, AME Zion and CME Churches are member churches of the World Methodist Council, so that dialogue is theirs.

What the dialogue has produced

The reports have worked through the Eucharist, ordained ministry, authority in the Church, the nature of the Church itself, the place of Mary, and the meaning of holiness. In 2006 at Seoul the World Methodist Council formally associated itself with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, the 1999 agreement between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, so the sixteenth-century condemnations over justification no longer apply between Catholics and Methodists in the way they once did. The open questions are the ones section 13 named: orders, the Eucharist and authority.

What has not been resolved

Catholic recognition of Methodist orders has not been granted and is not close. Intercommunion has not been established. The Catholic Church does not admit Methodists to communion in the ordinary course, and Methodist tables are generally open in a way that Catholic discipline is not, which produces real pain at funerals and weddings where families are divided. Anyone telling you these questions are nearly settled is not describing the dialogue accurately. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism and what it can and cannot do explains why the Church proceeds this way.

The part that can move now

The doctrinal questions belong to the dialogue commissions and will take generations. The historical question belongs to every parish this weekend, and it does not require anyone's permission. A Catholic parish can learn who Augustus Tolton was, can find out what its own diocese did in 1850 and in 1950, can read Open Wide Our Hearts, and can notice who is welcomed at its own doors and who is quietly seated at the back. St. George's did not intend to found a denomination. It intended to manage its seating.

15. Related Topics