Pope Francis says Mass in the port where the slave ships landed

CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, Colombia, September 10, 2017 AD — Pope Francis celebrated the closing Mass of his journey to Colombia this afternoon at the Port of Contecar, the working container terminal on the bay of Cartagena. He preached there on Saint Peter Claver, the Jesuit priest who went down to the slave ships in this harbour and baptised the people who came off them.

It was the last great gathering of a six-day visit, and its theme was “Let us take the first step!” Through the week Pope Francis had heard the testimony of Colombians who reached out to the people who had harmed them. At the Mass he spoke of “terrible wounds that I could see in their own bodies; irreparable losses that still bring tears”. “For decades Colombia has yearned for peace,” he told the crowd, and he asked them to take that same first step.

The bay has a history of its own. Between 1580 and 1640 AD Cartagena was the chief slave port of the whole Spanish empire in the Americas. Ten or twelve thousand Africans were landed here every year, bought for about four crowns a head on the coasts of Guinea, Angola and the Congo and resold in the city for two hundred and sometimes more.

St. Peter Claver was a Catalan Jesuit priest of the college in the old walled city. Brother Nicolás González, his companion of twenty-two years, once asked him how many of the enslaved he had baptised, and St. Peter Claver answered that by his own reckoning they were more than 300,000. When he made his solemn profession in 1622 AD he signed the document “Peter, for ever the slave of the negroes,” and wanted to be known by that name from that day. He died in his room at the college in the small hours of September 8, 1654 AD, after four years of illness. Pope Leo XIII canonized him in 1888 AD. Pope St. John Paul II prayed at his tomb in this city on July 6, 1986 AD.

Pope Francis had been in Cartagena since ten o’clock this morning. At half past ten, at St. Francis Square, he blessed and laid the corner-stones of two institutions for the people most in need. Afterwards he called at the home of Mrs Lorenza, who feeds and takes in the poor of the city every day. At noon he prayed the Angelus in front of the Church of Saint Peter Claver, where the saint’s relics are kept. A quarter of an hour later he went into the shrine.

At the Angelus Pope Francis described how St. Peter Claver had worked. “He waited for the ships from Africa to arrive at the New World’s main centre of commerce in slavery,” Pope Francis said. “Given the impossibility of verbal communication due to the language difference, he often ministered to these slaves simply through evangelizing gestures. For a caress surpasses all languages.” He said the priest had been accused of indiscreet zeal and had met strong criticism and lasting opposition from men who feared for the profits of the slave trade. Then Pope Francis described how St. Peter Claver died: “After consoling hundreds of thousands of people in their loneliness, he died without honours and was not remembered, having spent the last four years of his life in sickness and confined to his cell which was in a terrible state of neglect. This how the world paid him, yet God paid him in another way.”

A helicopter brought Pope Francis to the naval base at the port at a quarter to four. The Mass began at half past four. The homily carried the title “The Dignity of the Person and Human Rights”. He opened it on the city: “In this city, which has been called ‘heroic’ for its tenacity in defending freedom two hundred years ago, I celebrate the concluding Mass of my Visit.”

Cartagena has also been Colombia’s national seat for human rights for the past thirty-two years. Pope Francis read out the reason the Congress of Colombia had given in the 1985 law that made it so: that “thanks to the missionary team formed by the Jesuit priests Peter Claver y Corberó, Alonso de Sandoval and Brother Nicolás González, accompanied by many citizens of the city of Cartagena de Indias in the seventeenth century, the desire was born to alleviate the situation of the oppressed of that time, especially of slaves, of those who implored fair treatment and freedom.”

Halfway through the homily Pope Francis came to St. Peter Claver. “Alongside Saint Peter Claver were thousands of Christians, many of them consecrated,” Pope Francis said, “but only a handful started a counter-cultural movement of encounter.” He went on: “Saint Peter was able to restore the dignity and hope of hundreds of thousands of black people and slaves arriving in absolutely inhuman conditions, full of dread, with all their hopes lost. He did not have prestigious academic qualifications, and he even said of himself that he was ‘mediocre’ in terms of intelligence, but he had the genius to live the Gospel to the full, to meet those whom others considered merely as waste material.”

Near the end Pope Francis quoted St. Peter Claver for what he was asking of the country: building peace, he said, means “speaking not with the tongue but with hands and works”. He then thanked Archbishop Jorge Enrique Jiménez Carvajal of Cartagena for his words on behalf of the bishops and the people, and President Juan Manuel Santos for the invitation to come. He called the six days “intense and beautiful”, and told the crowd they had done him much good.

Pope Francis ended the Mass on St. Peter Claver. “We cannot just stand still,” he said. “In this very place, on 8 September 1654, Saint Peter Claver died, after forty years of voluntary slavery, of tireless work on behalf of the poor. He did not stand still: his first step was followed by further steps, then more and more.” Pope Francis meant the city: St. Peter Claver died in the college inside the old walls. He closed with a charge to the Colombians in front of him: “Bring them the embrace of peace, free of all violence. Be ‘slaves of peace, forever’. SLAVES OF PEACE, FOREVER.”

A helicopter took Pope Francis back to the airport of Cartagena at half past six. A farewell ceremony was held there at a quarter to seven. At seven o’clock he left by plane for Rome.