Vigils Reading – St Peter Claver

ST PETER CLAVER

THE SLAVE OF THE NEGROES

From Butler’s Lives of the Saints1

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He was born in Catalonia, about 1581… He graduated with distinction

[and entered] the Society of Jesus. He left Spain forever in April 1610, and was

ordained priest at Cartagena, in what is now the republic of Colombia. By the

time of his ordination the slave trade had been established in the Americas for

nearly a hundred years, and the port of Cartagena was one of its principal

centers…

At this time the leader of the work among the Negroes was Father Alfonso

de Sandoval, a great Jesuit missionary who spent forty years in the service of

the slaves, and after working under him Peter Claver declared himself “the slave

of the Negroes forever”. Although by nature shy and without self-confidence he

threw himself into the work with method and organization. He enlisted bands

of assistants, and as soon as a slave-ship entered the port… St. Peter Claver

plunged, with medicines and food, bread, brandy, lemons, tobacco to distribute

among the Negroes, some of whom were too frightened, others too ill, to accept

them. “We must speak to them with our hands, before we try to speak to them

with our lips”, Claver would say. When he came upon any who were dying, he

baptized them, and then sought out all babies born on the voyage that he might

baptize them. He had a band of seven interpreters, one of whom spoke four

Negro dialects, and with their help he taught the slaves and prepared them for

baptism, not only in groups but individually. He made use of pictures, showing

our Lord suffering on the cross; above all he tried to instill in them… some idea

that as redeemed human beings they had dignity and worth, even if as slaves…5

It is estimated that in forty years St. Peter Claver instructed and baptized

over 300,000 slaves… He took the same trouble to teach them how properly to

use the sacrament of penance, and in one year is said to have heard the

confessions of more than five thousand. Many of the stories both of the heroism

and of the miraculous powers of St. Peter Claver concern his nursing of sick and

diseased Negroes, in circumstances often that no one else, black or white, could

face.

In 1650… sickness attacked his emaciated and weakened body, and he

was recalled to the Jesuit residence at Cartagena. But here a virulent epidemic

had begun to show itself, and one of the first to be attacked among the Jesuits

was the debilitated missionary… After receiving the last sacraments, he

recovered, but he was a broken man…

On September 6, 1654 he was taken very ill and became comatose. The

rumor of his approaching end spread round the city, everyone suddenly

remembered the saint again, and numbers came to kiss his hands before it was

too late. His cell was stripped of everything that could be carried off as a relic.

St. Peter Claver never fully recovered consciousness, and died two days later on

the birthday of our Lady. The civil authorities who had looked askance at his

solicitude for mere Negro slaves, and the clergy, who had called his zeal

indiscreet and his energy wasted, now vied with one another to honor his

memory… He was canonized in 1888 and was declared by Pope Leo XIII patron

of all missionary enterprises among Negroes.