Peter Claver

Who they were

Peter Claver was born at Verdú in Catalonia on 25 June 1581. As a Jesuit student in Majorca he asked the doorkeeper, St Alphonsus Rodríguez, how to love God truly, and was urged to go to the Spanish Americas. He landed at Cartagena in New Granada, today's Colombia, in 1610, was ordained in 1616, and there worked for 44 years among the African slaves of the Atlantic trade.

He vowed himself 'slave of the Africans for ever'. Whenever a slave ship arrived he rowed out to meet it with food, care and comfort, dressed wounds, begged for them at every door, learned Angolan and used a team of interpreters, and brought thousands to faith and to a sense of their human dignity. Accused of rash zeal, he spent his last four years paralysed and forgotten in the infirmary, and died on 8 September 1654.

The miracles

He was canonised with St Alphonsus Rodríguez. In 1896 he was named patron of all Catholic missions among Black people. The miracles examined are not described in the sources we have used.

Why that counted as sanctity

Peter Claver saw Christ in the enslaved, when others denied they had souls, and served them body and soul for forty years, ending his own life forgotten.

Connected on this site

• Maria Teresia Ledóchowska Blessed
  “Peter Claver, dedicated to spreading Catholicism in Africa.” — Wikipedia
• Bernard John Quinn Servant of God
  “In 1922 he founded St Peter Claver Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the first church for Black Catholics in Brooklyn, and in 1928 an orphanage for Black children at Wading River on Long Island, which he rebuilt after it was twice burned.” — this site's research