On September 9 the Church keeps the optional memorial of St. Peter Claver (1580-1654), the Spanish Jesuit who devoted forty years to ministering to the enslaved Africans brought to the port of Cartagena de Indias in New Granada — modern Colombia — and who signed his 1622 profession document Petrus Claver, aethiopum semper servus, "Peter Claver, servant of the Africans forever."
Born on June 26, 1580, in Verdú, Catalonia, he entered the Society of Jesus around 1600. As a student in Palma, Mallorca, he came under the influence of the lay brother St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, who urged him toward the colonial missions. He arrived in Cartagena in 1615 and was ordained around 1616, after theology studies in Tunja and Bogotá. Cartagena was one of the two great slave-trading ports of Spanish America — some ten thousand enslaved Africans arrived each year, of whom roughly a third died in transit. Claver met each ship as it docked, carried the sick to the hospital he had built, baptized the dying, and heard the confessions of the living. He is estimated to have baptized some three hundred thousand and to have heard some five thousand confessions a year.
He died in Cartagena on September 8, 1654, aged seventy-four. He was beatified by Pius IX in 1850 and canonized by Leo XIII on January 15, 1888, alongside Alphonsus Rodriguez. Leo XIII declared him patron of missionary work among African peoples. He is the patron of Colombia, of race relations, of African Americans, and of seafarers.
His relics are enshrined in the Church of San Pedro Claver at Cartagena, the Jesuit church where he lived and ministered, his bones preserved under the altar. Cartagena de Indias is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its old city preserves the slave-trading wharves and the hospital Claver built. His birthplace at Verdú, in Catalonia, has a sanctuary dedicated to him.
