Saint Peter Claver

Every year, tens of thousands of Black Africans were kidnapped and crammed into stifling ship holds like animals. On a voyage of two or three months across the Atlantic, they lay packed together amid excrement, urine, maggots and the bodies of those who had died of disease. More than a third died before the ships reached port.

When those death ships docked at Cartagena, the survivors were dragged ashore: emaciated bodies of skin and bone, covered in foul sores, their eyes wild with terror.

As a young man, Peter studied at the renowned University of Barcelona and graduated with distinction in letters and philosophy. At twenty-two, he formally entered the Society of Jesus.

In 1605, Brother Peter Claver was sent to the college of Montesión on the island of Majorca to continue his studies in philosophy. There a meeting changed his life: he became close friends with Brother Alphonsus Rodriguez, an elderly lay brother who kept the door of the college and was full of the wisdom of God.

Recognizing the hidden apostolic fire in the young student, old Brother Alphonsus Rodriguez many times looked deep into Peter Claver’s eyes and spoke words that sounded like a prophecy:

“Brother Peter, why are you here? So many poor souls in the lands of the New World in the Americas are being lost for want of someone to proclaim the Gospel! Go to the Americas, Brother Peter! A rich harvest is waiting for you there!”

Those words set Peter Claver’s heart on fire. He asked his superiors to send him to the missions in the Americas. That elderly doorkeeper, whom the Church would later canonize on the same day as his young student, probably never imagined that his simple encouragement would sow the seed of one of the greatest lives of charity in the history of the Church.

In 1610 he set sail, leaving his Spanish homeland for New Granada, present-day Colombia. He completed his theological studies in Bogotá and was ordained a priest in Cartagena in 1616, at thirty-six.

He took along a team of interpreters who spoke many different African languages, slaves he had bought free and trained. He brought baskets of bread, fresh fruit, lemons, wine, medicine and tobacco.

Going down into the dark holds whose stench would make an ordinary person faint, Father Peter Claver did not hesitate to kneel beside the groaning slaves. He fed them soup spoonful by spoonful with his own hands, washed the excrement, pus and blood from their bodies with warm cloths, and bandaged the wounds where iron chains had cut deep into their flesh.

He told his co-workers:

“We must speak to them with the hands of care before we speak to them with the lips of teaching!”

Through those tender gestures of a father and a gentle mother, the hearts of the slaves, full of hatred and fear, melted. They realized that this man in a black habit was not a cruel white slave trader, but an angel sent by God to help them.

He taught them that though their bodies were imprisoned in the chains of human slavery, their souls were free, and they were children infinitely precious in God’s sight.

He gave each one a small metal medal to wear around the neck, engraved with the holy names of Jesus and Mary, urging them always to live honestly and keep their human dignity.

Nor did he stop at the port. Every year in the dry season Father Peter Claver walked thousands of kilometers to plantations and gold and silver mines deep in the jungle to visit the slaves he had known.

He slept in their tumbledown huts and ate their meager food with them. He bravely intervened with cruel plantation owners, demanding humane treatment for the enslaved workers.

He also spent time caring for lepers at the San Lázaro leper hospital outside the city, washing and bandaging with his own hands bodies rotting with the disease, their fingers eaten away.

His last four years, from 1650 to 1654, were four years of silent and painful martyrdom in a small, cramped room on an upper floor of the Jesuit house in Cartagena.

The man who had carried thousands of sick people was now forgotten. The community entrusted him to the care of a young Black slave. This servant was rough and heartless, often left him without food all day, let him lie in filth, and even insulted and beat the paralyzed old priest.

Yet in four years of mistreatment, Father Peter Claver never once complained about or reproached the one caring for him. He accepted all that pain as an offering of reparation to God.

The people of Cartagena poured into the house by the thousands, from officials and clergy to tens of thousands of Black slaves. They crowded into his little room, kneeling to kiss his paralyzed feet and touching their rosaries to his body.

Pope Pius IX beatified him in 1850, and on January 15, 1888, Pope Leo XIII solemnly canonized Peter Claver, on the same day as Saint John Berchmans and his old friend Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez.

In 1896 he was proclaimed patron of all missions to Black peoples throughout the world. The Church celebrates him on September 9 each year. His body now rests in an illuminated glass case beneath the main altar of the church bearing his name in Cartagena, and the adjoining house has become a museum displaying the history of the slave trade along with African and Indigenous cultural heritage. The very place where he served and endured his last years has become a living memorial, reminding later generations of both the crime and the mercy that once existed side by side there. In May 2022, the Church also dedicated a new, more solemn tomb to honor him, more than three hundred and sixty years after his death.