St. Peter Claver

Who they were

Peter Claver was a Catalan Jesuit sent to Cartagena, the largest slave port of the Americas, where ships arrived carrying human beings in conditions that killed a third of them in passage. In 1622, at his final vows, he signed himself Petrus Claver, aethiopum semper servus, slave of the Africans forever, and spent the next thirty years and more making the words literal.

When a ship was sighted he went out to meet it. He went down into the holds, the one place no one went voluntarily, with food, water, medicine, and a team of interpreters he had trained, formerly enslaved men speaking a dozen African languages, because he insisted that people be spoken to in their own tongue before anything else. He nursed the sick, defended the enslaved in the city, and worked the leper hospital besides. The estimate recorded at his process was some three hundred thousand baptized at his hands. His last four years he lay paralyzed, neglected and mistreated by the man assigned to care for him, a final chapter he reportedly received as fitting. The city that had tolerated him buried him in state. He was canonized in 1888 and named patron of missions to African peoples.

Why people turn to St. Peter Claver

Descendants of the enslaved. This page stands alongside St. Martin de Porres, St. Josephine Bakhita, and St. Katharine Drexel, and from a Black owned Detroit institution that shelf carries a weight worth stating plainly. Those who fight trafficking today work his exact waterfront.

How to ask their intercession

His method is the prayer: meet the need in its own language, in person, first. Ask his intercession for the people arriving somewhere in the hold of something. His patronage and Bakhita's are two ends of the same chain.