Saint Peter Claver Church

Saint Peter Claver

Almost two hundred and fifty years before President Abraham Lincoln issued his historic Emancipation Proclamation and three hundred and fifty years before the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C., a Jesuit priest named Peter Claver landed in Cartagena, Columbia. 

Born in Catalonia, Spain in 1580, Peter Claver later studied at the Jesuit College of Barcelona and entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1602. Studying philosophy at Majorca, Claver was persuaded to go to the Indies to save “millions of perishing souls." Moved by the fervent exhortations, in 1610 Peter Claver voyaged from Spain to Cartagena, where, after five years of further study, he was ordained as a priest. 

Cartagena, which owed its commercial importance to the superb natural harbor, was the principal slave market of the New World. Slave traders bought slaves in Angola and the Congo and sold them in Cartagena for fifty times more than they had paid for them. The two-month sea voyage between Africa and South America was both cruel and inhuman and claimed an average of one-third its human cargo. The approximate one thousand slaves a month who reached the port were sold as chattels into the South American economy. 

After working under Fr. Alfonso de Sandoval (the leader of the work among Negroes), Peter Claver declared himself the "slave of the Negroes forever" and threw himself into his ministry. With the help of multi-lingual assistants who were trained as catechists, Claver met and was allowed to board every slave ship that entered the harbor. While his assistants worked to convince the piteous black cargo that Claver was not a slave trader, he was able to work among them, offering immediate relief with medicines, biscuits, brandy, tobacco and lemons, which he distributed as tokens of friendship. Whenever he came upon a baby born during the voyage or a dying slave, Peter Claver would stop to baptize them immediately. 

Despite the brutal dehumanization by the slave masters, Claver was able to instill in the slaves a degree of self-respect, dignity and worth. During the intervals between the arrival of slave ships, Claver would wander through the town and beg substance and support to supply comfort for the next ship to arrive. He also tended to Dutch and English prisoners after the Spanish captured St. Christopher and St. Catherine. 

Enjoying the respect of the responsible officials of Cartagena and the devout Catholics of the community, his only opposition came from the traders and planters who were often inconvenienced by his prayer and instructional sessions among their slaves. Peter Claver became known as the Apostle of Cartagena as well as the Apostle of the Negroes. 

In 1650 Fr. Claver was stricken with a deadly plague which beset Cartagena. Becoming helplessly dependent during the last years of his life, he was racked with pain and unable to celebrate Mass. He remained in his cell, not only inactive, but neglected and forgotten. He lapsed into a coma and died on the anniversary of the birth of our Lady, September 8, 1654. 

Fr. Claver was canonized in 1888 when Pope Leo XIII declared St. Peter Claver as the patron saint of all missionary enterprises among Negroes.