Saint Peter Claver

Saint Peter Claver was a Spanish Jesuit and priest who for more than forty years served the Africans brought as slaves to Cartagena, in present-day Colombia. He is called the apostle of the slaves. His memorial falls on September 9, the day after the anniversary of his death.

He was born in 1580 at Verdú in Catalonia, into a farming family. He studied in Barcelona, and in 1602 he entered the Society of Jesus and made his novitiate in Tarragona. While studying philosophy at Palma on Majorca, he became friends with Brother Alphonsus Rodríguez, the elderly porter of the college there, now a saint. It was he who urged the young religious to devote himself to the missions in America.

In 1610, before his ordination, Peter set out for New Granada and reached Cartagena the same year. He completed his theological studies in Santa Fe, today’s Bogotá, and was ordained a priest in 1616. He learned the ministry among the slaves from a fellow Jesuit, Father Alonso de Sandoval. When he made his solemn profession in 1622, he signed it with the words “Petrus Claver, Aethiopum semper servus,” that is, “Peter Claver, slave of the Ethiopians forever.” At that time all Black Africans were called Ethiopians.

Cartagena was then the chief center of the slave trade in the New World. Whenever a ship from Africa put into port, Peter went out to meet it, brought food to the exhausted people, tended the sick, and stood up in their defense. He begged from door to door for food and clothing for them. He gathered interpreters and made them catechists. Pope Francis recalled that where he could not communicate with words, he spoke through gestures of mercy and kissed the wounds of the sick. He taught the truths of the faith and baptized; the Roman Martyrology speaks of nearly three hundred thousand baptized, a figure handed down by tradition. He also reached out to prisoners, foreigners, and the poor.

His work met with opposition. He was accused of indiscreet zeal, and even of profaning the sacraments by giving them to people who were denied the possession of a soul. Among the enemies of his work were also those who feared for the profits of the slave trade. In 1650 he fell ill with the plague. He survived, but spent his last four years in the infirmary of the religious house, almost forgotten and poorly cared for. He died in Cartagena on September 8, 1654.

Pius IX beatified him in 1850, and Leo XIII canonized him on January 15, 1888, together with Saint Alphonsus Rodríguez. In 1896 Leo XIII proclaimed him patron of all Catholic missions among Black people, and in 1995 his memorial was inscribed in the calendar of the whole Church. The saint’s relics rest in the church that bears his name in Cartagena, where John Paul II prayed in 1986 and Pope Francis in 2017.