St. Peter Claver, Dithering Novice

[1580–1654] FEAST DAY: September 9

Slavery was ubiquitous when Jesus Christ was on earth. To the people who lived two thousand years ago, the notion that an economy could operate without slaves was unthinkable, just as we cannot imagine an economy without employees.

Although Christ never said a word about slavery, his saying from the Sermon on the Mount, “All things therefore whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you also to them” (Matthew 7:12), certainly could be applied to it and would in time be the primary religious argument for slavery’s abolition.

When the apostles went out from Jerusalem to preach the gospel, they made no distinction been slaves and the freeborn. Men and women, whatever their condition, were welcomed into the Church. St. Paul put it best when he wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Whether they were conscious of it or not, by recognizing that in the eyes of God all human beings were equally worthy of salvation, the apostles were undermining the foundations of slavery.

In Europe, at least, slavery died out over time. By the twelfth century it was virtually unknown. Then, in the fifteenth century, the European exploration of Africa, Asia, and the Americas revived the moribund slave trade. The Portuguese explorers who followed the coast of Africa in search of new trade routes to Asia saw moneymaking opportunities everywhere they went. With their superior weapons, it was easy to conquer local people, and it was a short step from subduing a population to enslaving them. As one of the first “new lands” colonized by the Portuguese, the Canary Islands became the first place where slavery was reintroduced. When word of the situation reached Pope Eugenius IV in 1435, he fired off a letter to Bishop Ferdinand on the island of Lanzarote, denouncing the enslavement of the Canary Islanders and demanding that they be set free. He gave the Europeans on the islands fifteen days to liberate their slaves or incur the penalty of excommunication.

As the Portuguese and then the Spanish pushed farther and farther into fabulously wealthy unknown lands, the temptation to exploit the riches of these territories through the slave labor of the local population became irresistible. But, as people will do, the slavers came with a rationale for their actions: it was justifiable to enslave the American Indians, Africans, and Asians because they were less than human. Pope Paul III demolished that argument in 1537 when he published a document, Pastorale Officium, which asserted that “the Indians themselves indeed are true men” and that “no one in any way may presume to reduce said Indians to slavery.” In spite of papal condemnations, the international slave trade flourished among Catholics and Protestants for another four hundred years.

About this time a son was born to the Clavers, a farming family who worked the land in the province of Catalonia in northeastern Spain. The parents named the boy Peter. He was bright and deeply religious but found it hard to make a decision and stick with it. His parents sent Peter to a school run by the Jesuits in Barcelona. The Jesuits were still a relatively new religious order in the Catholic Church; their founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, had organized them in 1534. Yet even at this early stage they had a reputation as skillful teachers and trainers of young minds. The Jesuits were also renowned as missionaries: in Europe, by their preaching, their debates, and their publications, the Jesuits were pushing back the Reformation and bringing Protestants and fallen-away Catholics back to the Catholic Church; in foreign lands—the Americas, India, and Japan—they were bringing a rich harvest of new converts into the Church. The Jesuits were so famous for their intellectual achievements that people tended to overlook their works of charity. Yet Jesuits worked in hospitals and prisons and even served as chaplains to the slaves on the galley ships.

Such an active, exciting life appealed to Peter. He had many conversations with the Jesuits at his school about entering the Society of Jesus, but in spite of all the encouragement he received from the good fathers Peter was reluctant to commit himself. After vacillating for several years, Peter Claver asked to be received as a Jesuit novice.

At the Jesuit college of Montesión at Palma on the island of Majorca, Peter began his studies in philosophy. He had barely entered the novitiate when he began to second-guess himself. What if he was not cut out for an active life as a missionary or parish priest? Maybe his true calling was as a monk. Peter’s endless doubts and misgivings must have been maddening for his fellow novices, to say nothing of his confessor and his religious superior. Fortunately, help was nearby.

The porter at Montesión was a seventy-two-year-old lay brother named Alphonsus Rodriguez. Brother Alphonsus had had a family and a career, but after his wife and children all died, he gave up his business and entered the religious life. Although he was a Jesuit brother now, he hadn’t lost his ability, cultivated over many years as a businessman, to judge character. Nor had he lost his knack for handling a customer who couldn’t decide what he wanted.

Peter confided his doubts to Brother Alphonsus, who assured him he belonged with the Jesuits. Moreover, Brother Alphonsus thought Peter should ask his superiors to send him to the Americas as a missionary. Peter was stunned. But Brother Alphonsus insisted the way to overcome fear and indecision is make a bold move.

So Peter summoned up his courage and asked his superiors to assign him to the American mission. They gave their consent but suggested he should be ordained a priest first.

That was more commitment than Peter could bear. All his doubts about his religious vocation surfaced again, and once again he waffled. Perhaps the Jesuits at Montesión saw more in Peter than he saw in himself; perhaps Brother Alphonsus convinced them the life of a missionary was precisely what Peter needed; perhaps they just wanted him to go become someone else’s headache. Whatever their reasons, in 1610 they let Peter have his way and sent him to Cartagena, Colombia, un-ordained.

Cartagena’s location on the Caribbean Sea made it one of the principal ports for the slave trade in the New World: twelve thousand enslaved Africans were unloaded in Cartagena every year. After weeks crammed together in the dark holds of the slave ships, these tragic people were filthy, weak from hunger and dehydration, and half mad with fear. Many were sick. Some were dying. Yet, whatever their condition, all were driven into holding pens near the dock to be sorted out and sold later.

The only white man who treated the Africans kindly was a Jesuit priest, Father Alphonsus de Sandoval. When he heard the roar of the harbor cannon that signaled the arrival of another slave ship, Father de Sandoval gathered up food, water, and medicine and hurried down to the harbor. The comforts Father de Sandoval could offer the Africans were meager, yet he cared for his “parishioners” day after day until they had all been sold off and the pen was empty.

When Peter Claver, the apprehensive new Jesuit recruit from Spain, arrived in Cartagena Father de Sandoval made him his assistant. At first glance it would appear that the priest had made a terrible mistake. Yet the work in the slave pen transformed Peter. Once he recognized that he could do something for God and his fellow man, all doubts, all qualms, all uncertainties vanished. He asked his superiors in Cartagena to ordain him and to permit him to serve the slaves.

Peter’s zeal surpassed even Father de Sandoval’s. Every time a slaver sailed into Cartagena’s harbor, Peter took the pilot’s boat out to the ship and began his work at once down in the hold. On shore, as sailors and soldiers herded the slaves into the pens, Peter went with them. Over the years he built up a team of interpreters who could speak the languages of Guinea, the Congo, and Angola, the lands from which most of the captives came. Through his interpreters Peter tried to comfort the Africans and learn what they needed. Every day Peter and his interpreters returned with more food, more water, more medicines, and as he treated the Africans, he explained to them the basics of the Catholic faith. It is said that during the forty-four years Father Claver served in the slave pens, he baptized three hundred thousand Africans. It is impossible to assess if that number is accurate.

Whatever the number of converts may have been, Peter regarded them as his parishioners. True, he could not do anything for those who were sold to distant plantations, settlements, and mines. But he could serve those Africans who were put to work in Cartagena or at locations just outside the city. Father Claver kept up a steady round of visitations, saying Mass for his converts, bringing them the sacraments, and continuing their religious instruction. While he was there he reminded the masters of the law that forbade slave owners to split up slave families.

Father Claver’s devotion to his African converts enraged the white population of Cartagena. Church authorities heard complaints that Father Claver was keeping slaves from their work, contaminating churches and chapels with his congregations of unwashed Africans, profaning the Blessed Sacrament by giving Communion to “animals.” Some well-born ladies refused to enter a church if Father Claver had said Mass there for slaves. Even some of Peter’s brother Jesuits thought he was excessively devoted to the Africans. Yet after years of wavering Peter Claver had found his vocation, and he would not be deterred from it.

Peter kept up his exhausting routine until one day, when he was seventy-four years old, he collapsed in the slave pen. Back at the Jesuit residence Peter lay on his deathbed, abandoned by the white Christians of Cartagena. The only one who tried to nurse the dying man was an African servant. The end came quickly. Late in the evening on September 7, 1654, Peter Claver received the last sacraments, then fell unconscious and died shortly after midnight. A crowd of slaves broke down the gates of the Jesuit residence so they could see their saint one last time.

On January 15, 1888, the people of Rome witnessed a double canonization as Pope Leo XIII declared that Peter Claver and Alphonsus Rodriguez were saints.