Cartagena will bury Saint Peter Claver tomorrow at the city's charge

CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, New Granada, September 8, 1654 AD — Saint Peter Claver, the priest of the slave ships, died in his room at the Jesuit college here between one and two o’clock this morning. By eight the Augustinians had crossed the town to the college with their own bells tolling behind them. The superior of the Order of Mercy came after them, on the greatest feast of his own order. Behind him came the Spanish nobility of Cartagena and the grand vicar of the diocese.

St. Peter Claver had worked among the enslaved Africans of this port for forty-four years. Cartagena is the chief slave market of the New World. Men and women bought on the coasts of Guinea, Angola and the Congo for about four crowns a head are sold here for two hundred and sometimes more. Ten or twelve thousand of them are landed in a year. St. Peter Claver went down to meet the ships as they came in, carrying baskets of oranges, lemons and biscuit.

The church the city filed into this morning is a poor one. It is under thirty feet long, so low and damp that the floor is usually mud, and the mosquitoes come in off the bay. The public slaughterhouse stands on one side of it and a row of shops and drinking houses on the other. Below it are the wharves. Beyond them is the bay where the Spanish fleets gather, from this month until Christmas, to meet the ships coming up from Peru, Quito and Potosí with the silver.

The hospital of St. Sebastian, across the town, has no endowment, and when the fleets are in its sick run into the thousands. The religious of St. John of God who keep it beg its food, its comforts and its medicines through the streets. St. Peter Claver went the rounds of its wards with the physician, Doctor Adam Sobo.

As soon as it was light the rector of the college sent word of the death to the prior of the Augustinians. The prior had the bells of his own church tolled and brought his whole community across. They sang a solemn responsory over the body in the room where it lay, then went down into the church and sang a Mass as though the body were before them.

When the news reached the governor, Don Pedro de Zapata, he called the city magistrates into session. He put it to them that the city ought to take charge of the burial of so distinguished a man. Two of the magistrates went to the college to ask the rector to put the burial off until tomorrow. They asked also that the body be carried down into the church so that everyone could see it, and that a preacher be named for the funeral.

Enough clergy offered themselves to carry the body, but the crowd at the doors was packed so tight that the body had to be taken out through the great door of the college instead. Inside, nearly everyone was holding a lighted candle. People rushed in to kiss his hands and feet, and the Jesuits had to use force to keep them from pulling everything to pieces for relics. Churches all over the town sent tapestries and hangings for the altar. Don Pedro, Duke of Estrada, paid for all the candles. Doña Isabella d’Urbina, one of St. Peter Claver’s penitents, had a shrine of cedarwood made for the body, lined with rich cloth and mounted in gold.

The superior of the Order of Mercy was the first of the religious to cross the town, and he brought all his own community with him. The day is the greatest feast of that order, and they left their own church on it to come. The Marquis de Montealegre arrived at the head of the Spanish nobility and knelt to kiss the dead priest’s hand. The press was so heavy that the clergy and the Mercy and Augustinian religious had to help the Jesuits hold it back to get the marquis to the body at all. Don Suárez de Melo, canon of the cathedral and grand vicar of the diocese, came next with his clergy.

Toward night the crowd grew worse, when the Africans of the city and the poor came, everyone with beads or a piece of linen or a ribbon to touch to the body. The governor sent the city guard to protect it, and the soldiers could not get through to the church. The prior of the Augustinians came back after dark with six of his religious to relieve the Jesuits, who had spent the whole day pushing the crowd back. Someone brought a black velvet pall to cover the body, and the people shouted it away: they wanted to see the saint, as they were already calling him, once more.

The asking for relics did not stop. Twelve years later people in Cartagena were still coming for pieces of the man they held to be a saint. The church still stands, on the square that now carries his name in the old walled city, as the Santuario Museo San Pedro Claver (the sanctuary and museum of Saint Peter Claver), and his relics are kept there. Pope John Paul II made an appeal at the tomb on July 6, 1986 AD. Pope Francis prayed the Angelus in the church on September 10, 2017 AD.