Pedro Claver Corberó was born at Verdú in Catalonia on 25 June 1581, the son of a devout and industrious farming family, not of nobility. His mother died when he was still a boy, and at fifteen he received the ecclesiastical tonsure. With the support of an uncle who was a canon, he went to Barcelona, where he studied letters and philosophy and was noted for his intelligence and his piety. In a notebook he kept all his life he wrote as a student the sentence that would prove prophetic: "I must dedicate myself to the service of God until death, on the understanding that I am like a slave."
At the age of twenty he entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Tarragona, in August 1602. Sent afterwards to study philosophy at Palma de Mallorca, he came to know the porter of the college, the lay brother Alphonsus Rodriguez, a man of extraordinary holiness and of prophetic gifts. Alphonsus understood from God that this quiet young Catalan was destined to spend his life in the Spanish possessions of the New World, and he never ceased urging him to accept that calling. The desire grew in Peter's heart; he began theology at Barcelona, and before he had finished it he was assigned to the mission of New Granada, the land we now call Colombia.
He landed at Cartagena de Indias in 1610 and completed his studies in the Jesuit houses of the province, being ordained priest on 19 March 1616. Cartagena was then the greatest slave market of the New World. Because the native peoples were judged unable to endure the mines, merchants brought Africans from Angola and the Congo by the thousands, bought for a few crowns and sold for hundreds, packed into holds where a third of them died in the crossing. Popes had condemned the traffic, but greed outran their censures. Into this human wreckage the young priest was thrown, and he was formed for it by a master, Father Alonso de Sandoval, who had already given forty years to the enslaved and who found in Claver an apt disciple.
At his solemn profession in 1622 Peter signed his name in Latin: "Petrus Claver, aethiopum semper servus" — Peter Claver, servant of the Africans forever. From that vow he never turned back. Every month, when a slave ship was signalled, he went out in a small boat to meet it, carrying fruit, water, biscuit, tobacco, and medicine. The captives came up from the hold half-mad with terror and suffering; he went to each one, washed and bound their wounds, fed them with his own hands, and made them understand by signs and kindness that here at last was a father and a defender. He begged alms door to door in the city to clothe and feed them. He learned the language of Angola himself and gathered a company of eighteen interpreters, whom he trained as catechists, so that the faith could be preached in each people's own tongue. He taught with pictures, medals, and simple gestures of the hand, so that the unlettered could remember the sacraments and the mysteries of Christ, and he awakened in every one of them the sense of a human dignity that the traders had denied.
While the slaves were penned in the yards awaiting sale, he instructed and baptized them; it is reckoned that he brought some three hundred thousand souls to baptism and heard thousands of confessions each year. When the ships were not arriving he went inland from plantation to plantation, visiting each spring those he had baptized, seeing that they were treated humanely, blessing their marriages, and refusing the hospitality of owners and overseers in order to sleep in the slave quarters with his people. He preached also in the city square to sailors and traders, visited the hospitals, ministered to Muslims and to English Protestants, and prepared condemned criminals for death. On Sundays in Lent he gathered his flock, asked after their needs, and pleaded their cause against those who oppressed them.
Such charity had to be paid for. The slave merchants hated him; fashionable ladies of Cartagena would not enter a church where Father Claver had assembled the Africans; he was accused of indiscreet zeal and of profaning the sacraments by giving them to creatures who, it was said, "scarcely possessed a soul." Even his superiors were at times swayed by the complaints. He answered nothing, accepted every humiliation, and added severe penances to his labors. Lacking the support of men, he was given the strength of God, and the city that mocked him came to regard him as its oracle and protector; he was called the Apostle of Cartagena.
In 1650 the plague struck the city and struck him. He survived, but his body was broken, and he never worked again. For four years he lay immobilized in the infirmary of the Jesuit house, largely forgotten by the city he had saved, neglected and even ill-treated and left hungry by the servant hired to care for him. He never complained, receiving it as a just penance for his sins, and spent those silent years in prayer. He died on 8 September 1654.
At the news of his death the city awoke. Crowds pressed into his room to venerate him, and it was stripped bare of everything that might serve as a relic. The magistrates who had once thought him a nuisance ordered a public funeral, and he was buried with solemn honors. His body is venerated still in the Jesuit church of Cartagena, now called the Iglesia de San Pedro Claver. He was beatified on 16 July 1850 by Blessed Pius IX and canonized on 15 January 1888 by Leo XIII, together with his old friend and prophet Alphonsus Rodriguez. On 7 July 1896 Leo XIII proclaimed him patron of all Catholic missions among African peoples; he is honored as patron of enslaved people, of Colombia, and of seafarers, and the Congress of Colombia has set 9 September, his feast, as the National Day of Human Rights. Religious congregations, the Knights of Peter Claver, the Missionary Sisters of St. Peter Claver, and countless schools and parishes carry his name and continue his work.
Let us ask Saint Peter Claver to obtain for us his courage in charity, and today let us go out of our way to serve, with our own hands and without counting the cost, one person whom the world has thrown away.
