Peter Claver

Peter Claver (Pedro Claver y Corberó) was born in 1580 in Verdú, in Catalonia, then part of the Crown of Aragon in Spain. He came from a Catholic farming family of some means and received a classical education before studying at the University of Barcelona. In 1602 he entered the Society of Jesus at Tarragona. After his novitiate he was sent to the Jesuit college on Majorca, where he came under the lasting influence of the lay brother Alphonsus Rodriguez, the college porter later canonized as a saint. Rodriguez urged the young scholastic to seek a missionary vocation in the Spanish Americas, especially among enslaved Africans arriving in the Caribbean ports.

In 1610 Claver sailed to the New World and was assigned to Cartagena de Indias, then the chief slave-trading port of the Spanish Empire on the Caribbean coast of the New Kingdom of Granada (present-day Colombia). He finished his theological studies there and was ordained a priest in 1616. From that point he devoted himself almost exclusively to the enslaved Africans who were landed in the city after the Atlantic crossing. When ships arrived he went aboard with interpreters, food, water, medicine, and simple catechetical instruction. He tended the sick and dying in the holds, baptized those who accepted instruction, and later visited the enslaved in the city’s yards, hospitals, and nearby plantations. He customarily signed himself as the perpetual slave of the Africans. Jesuit reports and later hagiography credited him with a very large number of baptisms over some four decades; the exact total cannot be independently verified, but the scale and duration of the ministry are well attested in contemporary sources.

Claver also served prisoners, hospital patients, and the city’s poor, and he appealed to merchants and officials to mitigate the worst cruelties of the trade, though he did not publicly reject the legal institution of slavery as then practiced under Spanish colonial law. His personal life was one of severe austerity, fasting, and long prayer. In his last years he was disabled by illness, described in the sources as a form of paralysis, and for a time he was neglected by a servant assigned to care for him. He died in Cartagena on 8 September 1654.

Public veneration grew after his death. He was beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1850 and canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1888. Leo XIII later named him a special patron of Catholic missions among Black peoples. His remains are preserved in the church dedicated to him in Cartagena. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 9 September. He is invoked as patron of Colombia, of enslaved people and those who minister to them, of African Americans, of interracial justice, and of the city of Cartagena.