Saint Peter Claver (1580-1654)

A birth in Verdú, Catalonia

Pere Claver i Corberó was born on 26 June 1580 in Verdú, a small town on the Urgell plain, in Catalonia, then part of the Crown of Aragon.^[10][11] He came from a family of well-off and deeply Christian peasants; his mother, Anna Sobocano, died when he was thirteen.^[12] Some older notices give the year 1581: the discrepancy stems from the dating conventions of the time, but 26 June 1580 is now retained as the most certain date.^[13][14]

Nothing in this rural childhood foreshadowed a transatlantic destiny. But late-16th-century Catalonia was swept up in the great momentum of the Catholic Reformation: colleges, missions, sacramental fervour. Young Claver grew up in this climate of spiritual reconquest which, all over Spain, drew the best toward the priesthood and the new orders.

Studies in Barcelona and the Tarragona novitiate

Gifted and pious, Peter was sent to study letters and arts at the Estudi General of Barcelona (the city's university), where he distinguished himself by his intelligence and uprightness.^[15][16] It was there that his vocation matured. At twenty, he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Tarragona, on 7 August 1602.^[17][18]

The choice of the Jesuits was no small matter. The Society founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola was then the great missionary force of the Church, launched on the spiritual conquest of the world in the footsteps of Saint Francis Xavier, already apostle of the Indies and Japan. To enter the Jesuits in 1602 was to give oneself to a body wholly stretched toward distant missions and the service of souls.

Majorca and Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez: the missionary vocation

From 1605 to 1608, Claver pursued his philosophy studies at the college of Montesión, in Palma de Majorca.^[19][20] It was there that the decisive encounter of his youth took place. The college porter was a humble lay brother, already reputed for his holiness: Alphonsus Rodriguez, a former merchant turned Jesuit after losing everything, whom the Church would later canonize.^[21][22]

This old brother, a mystic with his gaze turned toward new lands, often spoke to the young student of the missions of America and the multitudes dying without knowing Christ. He discerned in Claver the instrument God was preparing and urged him to leave for the New World.^[23][24] The porter's influence would prove so decisive that the Church, three centuries later, would canonize master and disciple on the same day.

Jesuit tradition reports that the old porter never ceased urging the young student to leave to evangelize the Spanish possessions of America and to seek souls.^[25]

Departure for the New World

His philosophy completed, and before even being ordained priest, Peter Claver obtained from his superiors to be sent to the West Indies. He embarked from Seville in April 1610 and arrived that same year in Cartagena de Indias, in the New Kingdom of Granada — which then fell under the Viceroyalty of Peru, the Viceroyalty of New Granada not being created until 1717 — (present-day Colombia).^[26][27][28] A few sources place his arrival around 1615: the date of 1610 is the best established, the gap stemming from the distinction between arrival at the port and the start of his own ministry.^[29]

He then completed his theology at the Jesuit college of Bogotá, before returning to Cartagena to be ordained priest on 19 March 1616.^[30][31] From then on, his life would be one with this port city — and with those whom no one wanted to touch.

The great slave market of Spanish America

To understand Peter Claver's mission, one must first picture what Cartagena de Indias was at the start of the 17th century. With Veracruz, it was one of the two great legal ports of entry for African slaves in the entire Spanish empire of America.^[32][33] Every year, dozens of ships poured out their human cargo there, torn from the coasts of West Africa and Angola.

The figures are staggering: the old sources evoke up to a thousand slaves landed each month in periods of heavy traffic.^[34] After a crossing of several weeks in appalling conditions, many arrived dying, sick, terrified, convinced — many testimonies report — that they had been brought to be devoured.^[35] It was this world of raw suffering that Peter Claver chose as his field of apostolate.

“They were so exhausted and downcast by ill treatment and fright that they did not even dare lift their eyes.” — Saint Peter Claver, letter to his superior, 31 May 1627^[36]

Alonso de Sandoval, the forerunner

Peter Claver did not invent everything: he had a master and a predecessor, the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval (1576-1652), missionary in Cartagena and first theorist of this apostolate. Sandoval had published in 1627 a pioneering work, De instauranda Aethiopum salute (“On restoring the salvation of the Africans”), a true inquiry into the peoples, languages and conditions of the slave trade.^[37][38]

It was under Sandoval's guidance that Claver, a young religious, discovered the quays and the holds. But where Sandoval was above all an organizer and a scholar, Claver would be the man of daily hand-to-hand combat, to the point of exhaustion. The disciple surpassed the master in self-giving.

Ordination and the vow: “slave of the Blacks forever”

On 3 April 1622, Peter Claver pronounced his solemn profession in the Society of Jesus. At the bottom of the official document, in his own hand, he added a formula that sums up and seals his whole life:^[39][40]

“Petrus Claver, Aethiopum semper servus.” — that is: “Peter Claver, slave of the Blacks forever”^[41]

The word is exact and deliberate: not servant, but slave (servus). In a city where men were bought and sold, the priest declared himself voluntarily the slave of these slaves — overturning, with a single word, the entire logic of the market. This private vow, added to the public vow of religion, became the programme of nearly forty years of priestly service (1616-1654).

Present in Cartagena from 1610 until his death in 1654 — forty-four years — and priest from 1616, Peter Claver exercised his effective apostolate at the port until the plague of 1650 broke him.^{[42][43][44][45]}

Going down into the holds: speaking with the hands before speaking with the lips

As soon as a slave ship was signalled, Peter Claver rushed to the port. With his interpreters, he boarded the ship or hurried to the enclosures where the captives were penned, laden with provisions: oranges, lemons, dry biscuits, brandy, tobacco, and medicines.^[46] His pedagogy was of a heartbreaking rightness: to broken men, distrustful, understanding not a word of Spanish, love had first to be shown by gesture.

“Carrying two baskets of oranges, lemons, dry biscuits and I know not what else, we hastened to them. […] That is how we spoke to them: not with words, but with our hands and our deeds.” — Saint Peter Claver, letter to his superior, 31 May 1627^[47]

He washed wounds, warmed the dying with embers and aromatics, bathed exhausted bodies with wine, and by signs of encouragement won the trust of the fiercest.^[48] Only afterwards, with human dignity somewhat restored, could he proclaim Christ. This intuition — charity toward the body as the threshold of evangelization — makes him a forerunner of every mission that takes the whole man.

The network of interpreters

Cartagena received captives from dozens of peoples and languages. Claver, who himself learned the rudiments of the language of Angola (Kimbundu), understood he could do nothing without interpreters.^[49][50] He built up a veritable team of them — up to thirty over the years — African slaves or freedmen whom he trained as catechists.^[51][52]

The beatification processes preserved the direct testimonies of several of them: the Angolan Andrés Sacabuche, who spoke Kimbundu and Anchico, Ignacio Angola, José Monzolo, and the Wolof Francisco Yolofo, from Senegambia.^[53][54] These men left us some of the most precise accounts of the mission.

A detail revealing the saint's humility: during catechesis, Claver had the interpreters sit on high armchairs, while he himself took a lower place, on an earthen pot or a piece of wood — so that the catechumens would respect the authority of the catechists and understand that these men were, in his eyes, “more necessary than himself” to the work.^[55]

Catechesis and baptism: nearly 300,000 souls

The progression of Claver's catechesis was gradual and adapted to traumatized minds. He began with the essentials of baptism — its effects on soul and body — then came to the idea of God's judgment, and only afterwards to the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Passion of Christ.^[56] He refused to baptize without real instruction, however elementary, concerned that the sacrament not be emptied of meaning.

At the end of nearly forty years of this priestly labour (1616-1654), the old biographies and the canonization process credit him with about 300,000 baptisms of African slaves.^[57][58] The figure, constantly repeated, belongs as much to hagiographical estimation as to exact accounting; modern historians invite us to read it as the order of magnitude of a lifetime given, rather than as an administrative record.^[59] It remains that no missionary of the New World left such a mark among the captives.

Defending, caring, visiting: beyond baptism

Claver did not stop at the first welcome. Throughout the year, he visited the slaves on plantations, in mines, hospitals and even in prisons; he assisted the condemned to death and the lepers whom all fled.^[60][61] During Lent, he regularly gathered those of the city, inquired into their needs and defended them against the abuses of their masters.^[62]

His ministry overflowed the world of slaves besides: he preached to sailors, merchants, passing travellers, and did not hesitate to reprove the powerful. But he always kept for the most despised an absolute preference, refusing the honours and comforts his reputation could have earned him.

The hostility of Cartagena

Such a life could only offend a society wholly built on the slave trade. Claver faced tenacious opposition: the slave merchants looked askance at this priest who “wasted time” on their merchandise and reminded them of its quality as men.^[63][64] The high society of Cartagena, notably elegant ladies, shunned the churches where he gathered the Blacks, refusing to pray within the same walls.

He was even accused of profaning the sacraments by administering them to beings deemed barely human.^[65] To all these attacks, Claver opposed silence, patience and redoubled personal penances. His holiness ended up imposing itself on the very city that had mocked him.

Service as self-abasement: the image of the donkey

The whole spirituality of Peter Claver rests on a voluntary self-abasement. The man who signed himself “slave of the Blacks” had made the humblest service his path to holiness. The biographies sum up this docility with a rough and savoury image, that of the donkey^[66]: the donkey does not choose its load, does not complain, goes where it is led and carries the weight of others — such, according to these accounts, was Claver's definition of obedience and service. This spirituality of self-effacement rejoins the great Ignatian tradition of “all for the greater glory of God,” but pushes it to identification with the least of men.

Penances and interior life

Behind the apostle's overflowing activity hid an intense life of prayer and mortification. Witnesses report his long nightly orisons, his fasts and his rigorous bodily penances, which he imposed on himself notably in reparation for the sins committed against the slaves.^[67][68] There, in secret, he drew the superhuman energy his ministry demanded.

This balance between the hardest action and the most demanding contemplation is the mark of the great missionary saints. In Claver, the port and the oratory did not oppose each other: one nourished the other. His whole life expresses the conviction that seeking God and serving the poor are one and the same thing.

The dignity of man before his baptism

Peter Claver's most modern intuition is his conviction that every man, even a slave, possesses an inviolable soul and dignity. At a time when the colonial system treated Africans as movable goods, his gesture — washing, feeding, caring before evangelizing — proclaimed in deeds that these men were brothers, created in the image of God and called to the same beatitude.

It must be said exactly: Claver did not abolish slavery and led no political combat against the servile institution: repeated pontifical censures already existed in his lifetime, without managing to stop the trade^[69], and the Magisterium would specify its condemnation afterwards. His genius was of another order: making visible, in each captive, the human person that commerce sought to erase. That is why the 20th century could see in him a forerunner of human rights, and why in 1985 his name was associated with the defence of human rights.^[70] On the evolution of Catholic doctrine on the matter, see Black Slavery and the Catholic Church.

The plague of 1650 and the last years of abandonment

In 1650, an epidemic ravaged Cartagena. Peter Claver, who devoted himself to the sick, was himself struck by the disease. He survived it, but emerged physically broken, crippled and trembling.^[71][72] His last four years were spent almost entirely immobilized in an infirmary cell, dependent on others for the simplest gestures.

These years of powerlessness were perhaps the most crucifying. Crown of the trial: the slave charged with caring for him neglected him, sometimes leaving him without food or care — and the saint, faithful to his whole life, accepted this abandonment without a complaint, completing in total stripping the offering begun at the port.^[73][74] He who had served the slaves died dependent on a slave who neglected him: an ultimate conformation to the abandoned Christ.

Death on 8 September 1654

Peter Claver died in Cartagena de Indias on 8 September 1654, feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, aged about 74.^[75][76] At the news of his death, the city that had scorned him underwent a total reversal: the population rushed to venerate him, he had to be watched over under guard, and slaves and notables alike disputed the relics of him whom all already called a saint.^[77][78] His remains rest in the Jesuit church of Cartagena, which today bears his name (San Pedro Claver).

Tradition reports that Pope Leo XIII, who canonized him, is said to have confided that the life of Peter Claver had moved him like no other, apart from that of Christ.^[79]

Beatification (1850) and canonization (1888) with Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez

Peter Claver's cause ran its course over the centuries. He was beatified on 16 July 1850 by Pope Pius IX — some sources give 20 July, the gap concerning the date of the ceremony, not the year.^[80][81] Then, on 15 January 1888, Pope Leo XIII solemnly canonized him, together with his former master and inspirer, Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez.^[82][83]

This joint canonization of the porter of Majorca and the apostle of Cartagena seals, in the eyes of the Church, the providential link between the two men: the humble brother who urged, and the missionary who obeyed. The table below sums up the great stages of his life and glorification.

Patron of the missions to the Blacks and legacy

In 1896, the same Leo XIII proclaimed Peter Claver patron of all Catholic missions to Black peoples.^[84][85] His name became a banner: in the United States, the African-American fraternity of the Knights of Peter Claver (founded 1909) placed itself under his patronage^[86]; in Colombia, of which he is one of the patron saints, his shrine in Cartagena remains a major place of pilgrimage.

Beyond devotion, his example nourished the whole missionary social doctrine of the Church: the conviction that proclaiming the Gospel passes through concrete service of suffering man, and that no one is too despised to be loved in Christ's name. A major figure of the Church in Latin America and a radiant fruit of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Peter Claver remains, across the centuries, the witness that true charity is measured not by words, but by stooping hands.

His whole life illustrates the ideal of Ignatian spirituality — seeking God in all things, and all things in God — lived here in the holds of Cartagena.^[87]

• Black Slavery and the Catholic Church — the doctrinal and historical dossier on the trade, the pontifical condemnations and the position of the Church, of which Saint Peter Claver was the greatest witness in charity.
• Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) — the founder of the Society of Jesus, whose spirituality of discernment and service formed Peter Claver.
• Saint Francis Xavier (1506-1552) — the other great Jesuit apostle of distant lands, missionary model of the whole Society.
• Saint Rose of Lima (1586-1617) — the Peruvian contemporary, first canonized saint of the New World, another flower of holiness of Spanish America.
• The Church in Latin America — the great history of the evangelization of the continent in which the work of Cartagena belongs.
• The Catholic Counter-Reformation (1517-1648) — the movement of regeneration of the Church of which the Jesuit missions of America are a major fruit.
• What the Saints Say About Charity — anthology in which the example of Peter Claver illustrates charity pushed to heroism.