St. Peter Claver dies before dawn at Cartagena, on Our Lady's feast

CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, September 8, 1654 AD — Saint Peter Claver died between one and two o’clock this morning in his room at the Jesuit college here, while those at his bedside said the names of Jesus and Mary aloud. Shortly after midnight, when he seemed worn out, the Jesuits of the house recited the prayers for a departing soul over him. He lived about an hour longer, and died on the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Months ago he had told a fellow Jesuit that his death would fall on a feast of Our Lady.

St. Peter Claver was the priest of the slave ships. He was born at Verdú, in the diocese of Solsona in Catalonia, landed at this port in 1610 AD and was for forty-four years the apostle of the Africans brought ashore here. He met the ships as they came in from the coasts of Africa — twelve to fourteen of them a year, each with between three hundred and six hundred people in the hold. The records do not agree on his age: he was in his seventy-first year, or his seventy-third.

The way he worked the wharves was his own arrangement. As soon as a slave ship entered the bay, the governor or one of his chief officers sent him word, and men competed for the errand, because he promised Masses for whoever reached him first. He would ask what language the new arrivals spoke, collect his interpreters and hurry down with baskets of biscuit, preserves, brandy, tobacco and lemons. He went into the holds after the sick. When he made his solemn vows in 1622 AD he signed the document “Peter, for ever the slave of the negroes”, and asked to be known by that from then on. Brother Nicolás González, who was with him for twenty-two years, once asked him how many of the enslaved he had baptized since he began; St. Peter Claver said that by his own count it was more than three hundred thousand.

His work at the wharves ended four years ago. In 1650 AD he wore himself out preparing the city for the jubilee. Then news reached Cartagena that the plague, after Havana, Puerto Rico and Vera Cruz, had reached the shores of Terra Firma and was killing people there. He was already worn out, but he went out along the coast anyway to the African settlements, to prepare them for the jubilee too, and he came back from the missions of Tolú and Sinú so ill that his active ministry ended there. He was in danger of death, and was given Viaticum, the Communion the Church gives the dying. “My sins have drawn this pestilence upon this afflicted city, and Almighty God will no longer make use of me, because I have always been the most unworthy of His ministers,” he said as he received it.

He spent the four years after that in his room. The pestilence had left the college with very few Jesuits, each of them doing several jobs, and they could not attend him. The young enslaved boy assigned to look after him brought his food cold, often after eating the best of it, and sometimes left him for whole days. He never complained of the boy; what he said he minded was not being helped to dress, so that he could get to Mass. Two women of the city, Isabella and Jeromina d’Urbina, were almost the only people who still remembered him.

In October of 1651 AD, while he could still write, he signed a letter to the Jesuit novitiate at Tunja. With it he sent them the manuscript book of his old master at Majorca, St. Alonso Rodríguez. The book had crossed the Atlantic with him. He asked the novices who read it to pray for “a sinner, who having such a precious mine at his disposal, instead of drawing from it the pure gold of sanctity, has collected nothing but its rust.”

Towards the middle of this year he began telling people that his death was close, and he told Brother Nicolás González that it would fall on a feast of Our Lady. Brother Nicolás González asked him to remember Cartagena before God once he was in heaven. St. Peter Claver sighed and answered him: “I have lost all by my impatience under suffering.”

A Franciscan came to see him and said he was sorry that the king had ordered the demolition of the part of the college built on the city wall. St. Peter Claver told the friar that he would not see it pulled down, because he had asked our Lord to take him first.

The last time he left his room was on Sunday, September 6. Two African men held him up while he went down to the church, he received Communion and he was carried back. Passing the sacristy he said to the brother there, “I am going to die; what do you desire of me in the next life?” The brother asked him to commend the city and the house to God, and he promised that he would. That evening a violent fever took him.

Early yesterday the infirmarian went in to ask how he had passed the night and found him unable to speak or move. The physician came and said no remedy was left. He was given the last anointing. By then the only sign of life left in him was a faint beat of the heart.

The anointing was barely over when the people in the house went through the room and carried off everything in it. They left the quilt that lay over him, and a portrait of St. Alonso Rodríguez that one of the religious stood over and would not give up. A few days before, St. Peter Claver had handed a small spiritual book to a brother and told him, “Take care of it, or it will be carried off.”

News that he was dying spread through Cartagena during the day. A few of the leading citizens were let in first; then the crowd forced the door and filled the college — priests, religious, nobility and poor — kissing his hands and touching their beads to him while he was still alive. Children ran through the streets calling out that the saint was dying. The Africans of the city kissed his hands and wept over them, saying they had lost their protector and their father.

The crowd stayed until night, and even then the doors were hard to close. Some of his penitents sent two artists to take his portrait as he lay there without moving. Others argued over who should provide the coffin, and Donna Isabella d’Urbina was allowed to give it.

When he stopped breathing, everyone in the room knelt to kiss his feet. The body was dressed in his priest’s vestments, and the room was stripped a second time: his clothes and his bedding were torn up and carried away in pieces for relics. It was still dark when the body was laid out in the house. He had asked Brother Nicolás González to have him buried at the foot of his confessional, next to the door; the brother had told him it would be in the chapel of Our Lord instead.