Saint Peter Claver, Priest

Peter Claver was born in 1580 at Verdú in Catalonia and became a Jesuit. On Majorca the old porter of the college, Alphonsus Rodríguez, urged him to go to the Americas, and in 1610 he reached Cartagena in today's Colombia, then the chief slave market of Spanish America. Ordained there in 1616, he signed his vows “Peter Claver, slave of the Africans forever”. For nearly forty years he met each slave ship, went down into the holds with food, water and medicine, nursed the sick in the warehouses, taught through interpreters and baptized; tradition puts the number he baptized at some 300,000. He also visited prisoners and lepers. In his last four years he was ill and largely forgotten. He died on 8 September 1654 and was canonized in 1888.