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September 8 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

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event · CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, September 8, 1654 AD

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

The priest who met the slave ships at Cartagena for forty-four years died between one and two o'clock this morning, on the feast he had said would be his last.

In a bare limewashed room lit by one candle, a very old white-bearded priest in a black soutane lies dying on a low bed while four Jesuits kneel and pray at his side and a crowd of Spanish and African townspeople, some weeping, some holding beads, presses through the open doorway behind them.
St. Peter Claver dying in his room at the Jesuit college, Cartagena de Indias, September 8, 1654 AD. The Jesuits of the house pray at the bedside while the people of the city force the door. The portrait of St. Alonso Rodríguez stands beside him.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a seventeenth-century Spanish colonial oil painting on canvas, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait of St. Peter Claver, Museum of the Palace of the Inquisition, Cartagena de Indias (unknown artist, New Granadan colonial school; date not recorded on the source page, photographed 23 December 2019, Museo Palacio de la Inquisicion, Cartagena, Colombia) View source artwork.

Saint Peter Claver died in his room at the Jesuit college between one and two o'clock this morning, after forty-four years meeting the slave ships that came into Cartagena de Indias. Months ago he told a fellow Jesuit that he would die on a feast of Our Lady; today is the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Word that he was dying spread through the city yesterday, and the crowd forced the college door while he was still alive.

5 min read

More in this edition

A painting of a small whitewashed church with an open door on a hot square in a walled port city, a file of soldiers with halberds and a long body of black-robed clergy and religious approaching it from the left, a crowd of townspeople and African men, women and children waiting at the door with rosaries and candles, and the masts of ships rising beyond the roofs.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a seventeenth-century Spanish colonial oil painting on canvas, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait of St. Peter Claver, Museum of the Palace of the Inquisition, Cartagena de Indias (unknown; New Granadan colonial school, date not recorded on the source page; photographed 23 December 2019, Museo Palacio de la Inquisicion, Cartagena, Colombia) View source artwork.

place · CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, New Granada, September 8, 1654 AD

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

Saint Peter Claver, the Jesuit priest who spent forty-four years among the enslaved Africans landed at this port, died in the small hours of this morning. By eight the Augustinians had crossed the town to the Jesuit college with their own bells tolling, and the governor asked the city magistrates to bear the cost of the burial. Townspeople pressed in all day to kiss the body and pull at it for relics, until the soldiers sent to guard it could not get through the crowd.

4 min read

A sepia engraving of a woman in a black gown, short black cape and white ruffled cap sitting in profile at a plain writing table with a quill, an inkstand and an open book, in a whitewashed farmhouse room where another woman in the same dress waits by the door and a girl reads at the window.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of early nineteenth-century American stipple and line engraving, from the paper's reference portrait based on Mother Seton (J. Penniman, nineteenth century, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division) View source artwork.

profile · EMMITSBURG, Maryland, September 5, 1811 AD

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton lets the Archbishop decide if she may lead

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote to Archbishop John Carroll in Baltimore this week, asking him to decide whether she may belong to the community of sisters she founded at Emmitsburg, Maryland, and whether she may go on leading it. The rule the sisters are about to take up, framed in France for St. Vincent de Paul's Daughters of Charity, requires a widow to have settled her children's affairs before she enters; St. Elizabeth Ann Seton is guardian of five. She sent the community's constitutions down with her letter and did not press her own claim.

4 min read

A fresco of an elderly tonsured monk in coarse undyed wool sitting at a plain trestle table in a bare lime-washed cell, writing with a reed pen beside an open codex, an inkhorn and hinged wax tablets, with an olive slope and mountain seen through an arched doorway.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of Italian buon fresco on lime plaster, from the paper's reference portrait based on Come Benedetto compie la edificazione di dodici monasteri (Life of St Benedict, Scene 11: Benedict Founds Twelve Monasteries) (Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi), 1505-1508 AD, Great cloister, Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore, Asciano, Siena) View source artwork.

writings · MONTE CASSINO, this decade, 530 AD

St. Benedict finishes his rule for monks, calling it a beginners' minimum

Saint Benedict of Nursia, abbot of the monastery on Monte Cassino, has finished a book of seventy-three chapters that settles when his monks rise, what they eat and whom they obey. In its last chapter he calls it a minimum written for beginners and sends any reader who wants more to Scripture and to the Fathers. The book opens with a promise to introduce nothing harsh or burdensome.

4 min read

Today in the Church

The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Saint of the day

The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Church keeps today the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. The Roman Martyrology places her nativity nine months after her Immaculate Conception, which the Church celebrates on 8 December.

On this day in the Church

  • 1233 The seven Florentines who founded the Servite Order withdrew from the city to La Camarzia, just outside the walls, and afterwards to Monte Senario, eleven miles from Florence.Saint Peregrine LaziosiSource
  • 1429 St. Joan of Arc was shot through the thigh by a crossbow bolt in the ditch at the wall of Paris, and was carried off against her will while she urged on another assault.Our reportSource
  • 1911 St. Pio of Pietrelcina wrote to his spiritual director, a year and a day after the event, to describe the wounds he had received under the elm at Piana Romana.Source
  • 2010 Pope Benedict XVI completed his two-part general audience catechesis on St. Hildegard of Bingen in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican.Source

Quote of the day

“Peter, for ever the slave of the negroes.”
— St. Peter Claver, signing his solemn profession at Cartagena, 1622 AD, Bertrand Gabriel Fleuriau, S.J., The Life of the Venerable Father Claver, S.J., Apostle of the West Indies (London, 1849), p. 71