One small church, and a crowd nobody could push back

CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, New Granada, September 8, 1654 AD — Saint Peter Claver died in his room at the Jesuit college here between one and two o’clock this morning. He had worked among the enslaved Africans landed at this port for forty-four years. 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. It was the greatest feast day of his own order.

The main slave market of the New World

Cartagena is the main slave market of the New World. Men and women bought on the coasts of Guinea, Angola and the Congo cost about four crowns each. Here they are sold for two hundred, and sometimes more. Ten or twelve thousand of them are landed here in a year. St. Peter Claver went down to meet the ships as they came in. He carried baskets of oranges, lemons and biscuit.

A church under thirty feet long

The church the city came to today is a poor one. It is under thirty feet long. It is 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. A row of shops and drinking houses stands on the other. Below it are the wharves. Beyond them is the bay where the Spanish fleets gather, from this month until Christmas. They come to meet the ships bringing silver up from Peru, Quito and Potosí.

The city decides to pay

When the news reached the governor, Don Pedro de Zapata, he called the city magistrates together. He told them the city ought to take charge of the burial of so important a man. Two of the magistrates went to the college to ask the rector to put the burial off until tomorrow. They asked him to carry the body down into the church, so that everyone could see it. They asked him to name a preacher for the funeral too.

Plenty of priests offered to carry the body. But the crowd at the doors was packed so tight that it 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. The Jesuits had to push them back to stop them 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 had a case of cedarwood made for the body, lined with rich cloth and mounted in gold.

After dark

Toward night the crowd grew worse. 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 other Augustinians. They took over from the Jesuits, who had spent the whole day pushing the crowd back. Someone brought a black velvet pall to lay over the body, and the people shouted it away. They wanted to see the saint, as they were already calling him, once more.

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. It is called the Santuario Museo San Pedro Claver (the sanctuary and museum of Saint Peter Claver). His relics are kept there. </content> </invoke>