The Church reads St. Peter Claver's own letter about a slave ship

ROME, September 9, 2026 AD — The Church keeps the memorial of St. Peter Claver today, and the reading it appoints for the day is not a life of him written by somebody else. It is a letter he wrote at Cartagena de Indias on May 31, 1627 AD, the day after he had gone down to the harbour with two baskets of fruit to a slave ship newly landed.

St. Peter Claver was a Jesuit priest of the college at Cartagena. Between 1580 and 1640 AD the city was the principal slave port of all Spanish America. Ten or twelve thousand Africans were landed on its wharves in a year, bought on the coasts of Guinea, Angola and the Congo for about four crowns a head and sold in the city for two hundred and sometimes more. He worked among the people landed there for forty-four years, and he died in the city in 1654 AD.

The letter is printed as the second reading of the Office of Readings, one hour of the Church’s daily prayer. Bishops and priests say the full sequence of hours every day, and religious communities bound to choir recite the whole of it daily, so wherever the memorial is kept this is the reading appointed for September 9. For today the Church chose his own letter and gave it a heading: “To preach the Gospel to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to proclaim pardon to captives.”

The letter opens with its errand. “Yesterday, May 30, 1627, on the feast of the Most Holy Trinity, numerous blacks, brought from the rivers of Africa, disembarked from a large ship,” St. Peter Claver wrote. “Carrying two baskets of oranges, lemons, sweet biscuits, and I know not what else, we hurried toward them.”

The quarters where the new arrivals had been put were full. “When we approached their quarters, we thought we were entering another Guinea. We had to force our way through the crowd until we reached the sick,” he wrote. The sick were lying on wet ground and in puddles of mud. Someone had built up a mound of tiles and broken brick against the damp, and that mound was their bed; they were naked, with nothing to cover them.

St. Peter Claver and the priest with him went into a warehouse for materials. “We laid aside our cloaks, therefore, and brought from a warehouse whatever was handy to build a platform. In that way we covered a space to which we at last transferred the sick, by forcing a passage through bands of slaves,” he wrote. Then they divided the work between them: “one group my companion approached with an interpreter, while I addressed the other group.”

Two of the men could not be spoken to at all. “There were two blacks, nearer death than life, already cold, whose pulse could scarcely be detected,” he wrote. The two priests raked live coals together with a tile and set them down near the dying men. Onto that fire they threw the aromatics they had brought: “of these we had two wallets full, and we used them all up on this occasion.” The dying men had nothing to be wrapped in, and asking their owners for anything would have been a waste of breath. So the priests fanned the smoke over them with their own cloaks, “by which they seemed to recover their warmth and the breath of life. The joy in their eyes as they looked at us was something to see.”

No word of explanation had been spoken to the two men, and St. Peter Claver says in the letter why not. “This was how we spoke to them, not with words but with our hands and our actions. And in fact, convinced as they were that they had been brought here to be eaten, any other language would have proved utterly useless.” Then they turned to wine: “Then we sat, or rather knelt, beside them and bathed their faces and bodies with wine.”

The teaching came last, in stages. “After this we began an elementary instruction about baptism, that is, the wonderful effects of the sacrament on body and soul,” St. Peter Claver wrote. Only when the men’s answers showed they had understood that much did the instruction go further, to the one God who rewards and punishes each according to his merit. Then St. Peter Claver declared to them the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Passion. He showed them the figure of Christ fastened to the cross, painted on the baptismal font with streams of blood running down from the wounds, and led them in an act of contrition in their own language.

The responsory printed immediately after the letter is from the Gospels: “I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was homeless and you took me in,” with the response, “When you did these things for the most neglected of my brothers, you did them for me.”

The prayer said over the day names St. Peter Claver, in Latin, servorum servum (a slave of slaves). In English it runs: “O God, who made Saint Peter Claver a slave of slaves and strengthened him with wonderful charity and patience as he came to their help, grant, through his intercession, that, seeking the things of Jesus Christ, we may love our neighbor in deeds and in truth.”