Saint Peter Claver

Saint Peter Claver was born at Verdú, in the diocese of Solsona, in Catalonia. His father, Pedro Claver, and his mother, Ana Sabocano, intended him for the Church from his early childhood. Fleuriau's Life says his mother wished to imitate Anne the mother of Samuel and Anne the mother of Mary.

An uncle held a canonry at Solsona, but the boy was sent to Barcelona for grammar. He studied letters at the grammar school and virtue at the Jesuit college. The University of Barcelona gave him his first degrees, and the bishop conferred the tonsure and four minor orders.

St. Peter Claver entered the Jesuit novitiate at Tarragona on August 7, 1602 AD. He made his first vows there on August 8, 1604 AD, before the Blessed Sacrament.

The Society sent him to the new college at Majorca in 1605 AD to study philosophy. He landed and went straight to Brother Alonso Rodríguez, the porter, who became his spiritual director. St. Alonso Rodríguez pressed him to evangelize the Spanish possessions in America, and St. Peter Claver asked his superiors for those missions.

He reached Barcelona in November 1608 AD to study theology. His provincial signed the leave for the Indies at Tarragona on January 23, 1610 AD, after two years of the course. St. Peter Claver sailed from Seville that April and landed at Cartagena, the main slave market of the New World.

He went inland to Santa Fe, where no studies could be established until 1612 AD. Orders returned him to Cartagena in the last days of November 1615 AD. The bishop of the city ordained him a priest on March 19, 1616 AD.

Father Alonso de Sandoval was called to Lima in 1617 AD, and the whole ministry to the Africans landed at Cartagena fell to St. Peter Claver. Twelve to fourteen ships reached the port each year, each carrying between 300 and 600 captives in its hold.

Towards the end of 1622 AD he was ordered to make his solemn profession of four vows. He accepted only on condition that he might add a vow of his own, to serve the enslaved for ever. He then signed the act of profession in Latin.

On May 30, 1627 AD, the feast of the Most Holy Trinity, a large ship unloaded Africans at Cartagena. St. Peter Claver and his companion hurried down with two baskets of oranges, lemons and sweet biscuits. They laid aside their cloaks and built a platform to lift the sick off the wet ground.

Two men were already cold, their pulse scarcely to be found. The priests gathered live coals with a tile, threw on aromatics, and drove the smoke over them with their own cloaks. Then they knelt beside the sick, bathed their faces with wine, and began an instruction on baptism.

The canonization process names at least thirty-two interpreters who worked with St. Peter Claver, among them Andrés Sacabuche and Ignacio Aluanil of Angola. When he catechized he seated the interpreters on chairs and stood, or sat on the floor himself. A priest who found an enslaved interpreter in a chair moved to strike him out of it, and St. Peter Claver stopped him.

A superior examined his teaching and forbade him his catechetical formulas and the images he used with them. The abstract method that replaced it failed, and the superior gave him full freedom to take up his own again.

St. Peter Claver came back to Cartagena ill from the missions of Tolú and Sinú in 1650 AD. His active ministry ended there, and he lived four more years in illness. La Civiltà Cattolica records that he spent those years in what Pope Francis called a frightful state of abandonment, neglected by the man set to care for him.

Ill at Cartagena, he signed a letter on October 28, 1651 AD depositing Brother Alonso Rodríguez's manuscript at the novitiate of Tunja. He told Brother Nicholas Gonzales that he would die on a feast of Our Lady. He died in the small hours of September 8, 1654 AD, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The religious of St. John of God sang a solemn Mass for him hours after his death. The Augustinians followed at nine with the city magistrates and the governor and his staff. The corporation of Cartagena celebrated a magnificent service on September 14, 1654 AD, and the governor repeated the honours the next day at his own expense.

Pope Pius IX beatified him on July 16, 1850 AD. Pope Leo XIII canonized him on January 15, 1888 AD together with St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, the porter of the college of Majorca, and gave his encyclical on the abolition of slavery that May. Pope John Paul II made an appeal at his tomb on July 6, 1986 AD, in the church where his remains are kept, and Pope Francis prayed the Angelus there on September 10, 2017 AD.