Feast day: September 9

St. Peter Claver

Priest · 1580–1654

Patron of Slaves, Colombia, race relations, seafarers

Spanish Jesuit in Cartagena who met every slave ship for 40 years with food, medicine, and dignity, calling himself 'the slave of the slaves forever.'

Peter Claver was born in 1580 in Catalonia, Spain, and as a young Jesuit, encouraged by the humble porter and saint Alphonsus Rodríguez, who told him to go and win souls in the New World, he asked to be sent to the Americas. In 1610 he landed at Cartagena, on the coast of what is now Colombia — the principal slave market of the Spanish New World, where thousands of captured Africans were unloaded in chains every year in conditions of unspeakable horror.

To these most abandoned of all people Peter Claver gave his life. He signed himself 'the slave of the Negroes forever,' and he meant it. Whenever a slave ship was sighted, he went out to meet it, descending into the stinking holds with food, medicine, and brandy, tending the sick and dying, and treating each terrified, brutalized captive with a tenderness and respect they had not known since their capture.

For forty-four years he labored among them. He learned to communicate through interpreters, cared for their bodies first and then taught them the faith, by tradition baptizing some three hundred thousand, and he defended them against the cruelties of the slave-owners and traders, making himself a nuisance to the powerful for the sake of the powerless. He insisted always that the slaves were not animals or property but children of God.

Worn out and finally crippled and neglected in his last years — tended, with bitter irony, by an African servant who treated him harshly — he died at Cartagena in 1654 as the whole city, suddenly aware of what it had lost, crowded to honor him. Canonized in 1888, he was named the patron of all missionary work among Africans and of the cause of human rights.

He personally baptized an estimated 300,000 people — and signed his vows 'Peter Claver, slave of the slaves forever.'

“We must speak to them with our hands before we try to speak to them with our lips.”
— St. Peter Claver

Image: User Andymeyer on en.wikipedia (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/11763a.htm