Everything to that time was old. So many who perish, not because they seek their own loss, but because no effort is made to save them. Into this fire we tossed aromatics. Most of the major European nations dabbled in the slave trade, with Portugal paving the way, and England soon monopolizing it. Thou gavest life, I pray no act of mine may take away or mar that gift of Thine (continues below). Someone told the saint about their plight. Another excess that occupied his zeal and caused him great anxiety was certain pagan festivals and rites that weak Christians sometimes slipped back into. The saint refused to rest until he had thoroughly expurgated these unholy interferences which, among the slaves, were always connected with the sin of drunkenness. His outstanding charity led him to fulfill everyone's spiritual needs and combat their moral misery. After his ordination in 1616, he dedicated himself by special vow to the service of the Negro slaves-a work that was to last for thirty-three years. He joined the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), and after his novitiate in Taragona was sent to the college of . In addition, the man of God found time to organize a talented black choir. There were others who could solve the problem of slavery; Claver was concerned about the slaves. The major contagion was smallpox; but others. Their work resulted in a unique tunnel system that is well over 80 km . Perhaps their dissatisfaction with themselves was the underlying cause of their cruelty, much like a man who has been a failure takes out his resentment on a dog. During his life he baptized and instructed in the Faith more than 300,000 negroes. In fact, the Catholic Church, for so doing, granted them spiritual benefits. But when he spoke to them he spoke exactly of what they would expect a priest to speak about: God, heaven and hell. His feast is observed throughout the Americas and other places around the world on the 9th of September. But he found time to care for other sufferers besides slaves. The kindly works of Father Claver section just short of forty years of this period. So Claver gave it none- except what was absolutely necessary to sustain life. And it was here, as a boy, that Peter Claver had climbed the penitential road of the pilgrims many times with his parents and family, only to do it now years later as a black robed beggar in imitation of his father, Ignatius. Sometimes these sermons would last for hours, and he did not let the intense heat deter him. How many more miracles have taken place in connection with this church over the past 150 years, no one knows. Some cases involved actual diabolic manifestations. This time he stumbled into the Jesuit residence with a body that could scarcely be recognized. He never complains in any circumstances, for he is only an ass. In Claver, however, was found a representation of the other side of the Spanish conscience, namely, an abiding affection for humanity especially Gods dark children whom he heard early on were ill-treated with this despicable trade. The saint allowed it, provided it was decent, but quite often the temptation got the better of them to overdo it, and it more often than not led to promiscuity. Claver enlisted bands of assistants, cajoling these people whether by money, goods or services, and as soon as a slave ship entered the port Claver dropped everything and went to wait on its living freight. One Turkish galley slave had resisted Clavers pleadings for over twenty years when the saint heard that a sickness had put him at deaths door. Our Saints upbringing carries nothing too spectacular about it. From a letter written by Peter Claver, priest, to his superiors, written in the Spanish language, 31 May, 1627. epist. They were packed together like sardines in a can, left to wallow in their own sweat, vomit, urine and human waste. The Reformed churchmen looked on in a kind of curious awe as they watched the majesty of a ceremony they had heard so reviled. Claver showed them that they were loved even more than they were abused, and that divine love must not be outraged by evil ways, by cruelty and lust. He felt he could never advise another to bear a cross that he himself wasnt already bearing. In some cases, their terror was so grave that the victims hearts literally froze and they died from shock. PETER CLAVER, PRIEST. England, Spain, Portugal, Holland and France fought over what they found here while they each set up shop here in hostile territory, in instances, owned and operated by the original peoples they found here. So severe were the lashings that the neighbors shuddered when they heard the sound of them in the still of the night air. What! One can hear the experts on the psychology of the underprivileged gasp- How dare he arouse guilt complexes with these victims of white racism!. Peter Claver was born in 1581 to a devout farming family in the Catalonia region of Spain. St. Peter Claver Sterling Silver Oval Pendant, Practical Practice of Fasting with Fr Dwight Longenecker, 10 important things to consider during Lent, The Happy Priest on Lent, Happiness and the Call to Selfless Love, Daily Readings for Tuesday, February 28, 2023, St. Hilary, Pope: Saint of the Day for Tuesday, February 28, 2023, Lenten Prayer: Prayer of the Day for Monday, February 27, 2023. In a short while, when these poor creatures were fattened up a little and washed, they would be auctioned off in the market place and sometimes end up far away. Lifting his hands, they watered them with tears, crying out that they had lost their greatest friend and protector. The U.S. bishops have invited Catholics to observe the day with fasting and prayer for an end to racism in the United States. He embraced lepers, kissed cancerous lesions, sucked out poison from running ulcers, washed the unclean and dined in their unsightly hovels, nor did he refrain even from eating food some despairing suicidals had rejected from their own mouths, in his determination to gain their confidence. Its a filthy voyageas well as a laborious [one]., Sir Dalby Thomascommander of the Royal Africa Company at Cape Coast, the Gold Coast, c. 1700Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870,Touchstone Books, 1997. Four years is a long time to be laid up. The Thirty Years War and the wars of religion was the backdrop for this chapter of history within which Claver lived. There was nothing artificial about Peter Claver. To Claver, they were all important. Nor could he appreciate any human consolation now, as his soul had already begun to break the web that so finely separated him from the vision of his Desire. It behooves me, Claver once wrote, always to imitate the example of the ass. Of these we had two wallets full, and we used them all up on this occasion. Meanwhile, a man of importance ran through the streets, totally oblivious to human respect, and knocked forcefully at a door. Claver was less successful in his efforts to make converts among the Muslims who came to Cartagena to do business, but he managed to bring a number of Moors and Turks to the faith, though one held out for thirty years before succumbing, and even then a vision of our Lady was required to convince him. The saint would never complain. The saint made it so simple for their confused and despairing consciences that not one of Cartagenas condemned criminals went to his execution unrepentant. Diei 31 maii 1627 ad Superiorem suum data: edit. Peter Claver was seventy-one years old. [in lingua hispanica] A. Valtierra, S.J., San Pedro Claver, Cartagena, 1964, pp. Book a Tour Virtual Tour Ways to Give Online Donations No time was too early for these faithful Cartagenians to unburden their souls to God. to peoples judged, by the impoverished social consciousness of that time, substandard in their origin, purpose and development. But when he saw the condition of Africans in the stinking slave pens of Cartagena, Colombia, he became bold and outspoken. He related to his confessor that in one of his visions he was taken to the abode of the blessed by his guardian angel, who pointed out to him those magnificent jeweled thrones described in the Apocalypse. At that moment. He became the apostle of Cartagena as well as of the Africans and in so huge a work was aided by God with those gifts that particularly pertain to apostles, of miracles, of prophecy and of reading hearts. The priest watched as the saint caressed the ulcerous patient like a mother, and then put his lips to the most pestiferous of his sores. New lands to the west crossing the Atlantic Ocean had been discovered two hundred years previous. He had baptized and taught the faith to more than 300,000 slaves during his four decades in Cartagena. Pius II (whose Patron was a slave) did so in 1462, calling slavery a great crime. Urban VIII (1539) strongly opposed it. When he is despised and neglected, he is still dumb. Leader: God, + come to my assistance. Under the chaplaincy of this unique man, whose astounding charity to the slaves had been talked of even behind cell walls, the prisons were transformed into virtual monasteries. Much as men are willing to forgive those, who wrong them, yet they' never . Truer to his own biography, what might we learn from Claver . He stayed there in his confessional until midday. Fr. Cursed be the law of the false prophet Mahomet, as well as all those who follow it. And on and on the stories go. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church there is no salvation). The missionaries expenses were paid for by the Catholic King, Philip III, who had requested from all his provinces at least one priest to be sent to the recently established kingdom of New Granada (Colombia) across the ocean. That is why Saint Peter Claver traveled such a lonely road. How many souls in America might be sent to heaven by priests who are idle in Europe?. So filthy did the cloak become that, in a days labor, it would have to be washed seven times. In the shanties, his first concern was to pick up the dying off the mud floor onto which many had collapsed, and to place them on mats. It was an era of expansion. One shipload would average between five and six hundred blacks from as many as fifteen or twenty African nations or tribes. It officially closed in. But the conclusion cannot be avoided that only the worst of the Spanish masters can be compared with, say, the English slave-owners of Jamaica in the 17th to 18th centuries, whose physical cruelty was no less than fiendish and diabolical by report. Father Claver was already known for strong discipline of his body. Africans at that time were abused because they were backward and exploitable, not because they were black. They requested that the Jesuits transfer his body to the church where the populace could see him for the last time and properly venerate his remains. Peter Claver was spiritually mailed to the Cross of Jesus in Cartagena. He shortly afterwards heard the confession of Doa Isabella, and told her it was for the last time, and on September 6, after assisting at Mass and receiving holy communion, Claver said to his dear friend, Brother Nicholas Gonzalez, I am going to die. That same evening he was taken very ill and became comatose. Most of the more difficult inmates were pirates or sailors who ended up their profligate careers afoul of the law in the golden city of the Indies, although the local element of Spaniards and slaves contributed a fair share to the hands of justice. When sailors sailed into town the vices and disorder of the port and other disturbances increased. Near the confessional he also had holy books with pictures of the Passion, which he insisted that all the people ponder before they confessed. On one occasion, as out future apostle passed by his spiritual master with a fellow student on their way to recreation, Brother Alphonsus stopped them and said, Remember, the Three Persons of the Most Blessed Trinity go with you. Instantly the holy porter was seized by a heavenly rapture and he stood senseless as if in trance. Many of the lepers could not speak at all; they could only look at him, if they had eye, and touch the tears on his cheeks while they moaned some sort of guttural, Thank you.. St. Peter obtained his first degrees at the University of Barcelona. One of them appeared even more splendid than the rest. In 1853 Ignatius Strecker had brought his family from Germany to the United States, and in 1861 he was working at St. Louis in a soap factory. For this poor sinner all Claver could do was to pray, for words were useless. Our Present . Dedicated to a South American human rights pioneer whose remains still rest there today, Sanctuary of Saint Peter Claver exudes a sense of tranquility. Episode 361: Whether God Exists? the Five Proofs, The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Outside the Church there is no Salvation (Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus), Saint Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire, Brother Francis, M.I.C.M. The slave of the slaves believed in simplicity. So horrible was the scene and revolting the conditions that a friend who came with Father Claver once could never face it again, and of Father de Sandoval himself it was written in one of the diary entries of his Jesuit province that, when he (Clavers friend) heard a vessel of Negroes was come into port he was at once covered with a cold sweat and death-like pallor at the recollection of the indescribable fatigue and unspeakable work on the previous like occasions. Father Peter Claver was overjoyed and dragged himself from his bed to greet his successor. They needed a voice to ease their burden, not to make it heavier with bitterness and anger. There was hardly a Pope who had to face the problem when it surfaced after about a thousand-year dormation, that did not condemn it. Names like Francis Xavier, Francis Borgia, Robert Bellarmine, Alphonsus Rodriguez, Peter Canisius, Aloysius Gonzaga, John Francis Regis, and Andrew Bobola gave testimony to the good foundation laid by a wise father who was shortly to be canonized. | Prioress: Sister Marie Thrse, M.I.C.M. And, in their simplicity, they would laugh and hug those whom they found to have the same new name as they, repeating it over and over again like children. On Ash Wednesday, Mark Wahlberg gave an interview to the Today Show about why faith is important to him, and working with the Catholic prayer app Hallow ( https://hallow.com/ ). By far the greatest damage the devil suffered from Father Claver was in the confessional, though some of us may cringe when we consider his methods of extracting vice. Mt 4:1-11). . The startled priest, having been told the identity of the man kneeling before him, immediately lifted Father Claver up and dropping to his knees he likewise kissed the reverend feet of his predecessor with great emotion and confusion. If you donate just $5.00, the price of your coffee, Catholic Online School could keep thriving. Asare-Dankwah, 62, has denied the rape accusation. Missionary Sisters of St. Peter Claver of North America At the Service of the Missionary Church AN INTERNATIONAL CONGREGATION OF WOMEN RELIGIOUS Our Spirituality The most divine of divine things is to cooperate in the salvation of souls. And to save many souls.. The Novitiate in Tarragona was to our young novice a foretaste of the delights of the blessed in paradise. One by one, the religious and the Negroes clasped his feet, which were giving off such a heavenly fragrance, and bathed them with their kisses. John Asare-Dankwah ran the St Peter Claver church in New Orleans' historic Treme neighborhood from 2014 until early 2021, when a lawsuit alleging that he raped a boy on an out-of-state overnight trip years earlier prompted church officials to indefinitely suspend him from his role. Baptism was received with such an emotion of joy as to move the hardest heart. Though the other young missionaries who were chosen along with our saint received Holy Orders before they departed, Claver decided not to take upon himself the awesome privilege. You can add to these the faded and worn cloak of Saint Peter Claver. He lived from 1581 to 1654. M.J.K. I love Thee very much. Printable Catholic Saints PDFs Europeans and their ways, even their religion, met with suspicion and, in instances, outright hostility among some of the natives of the New World. During his life he baptized and instructed in the Faith more than 300,000 negroes. The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary were founded in 1949 by Father Leonard Feeney, M.I.C.M. When he viewed their deplorable condition and saw the fear in their faces, he broke down and cried. Matters for him were complicated by an outbreak of an epidemic in the area which claimed as one of its first victims, Father Claver himself. They knew he meant what he said and what he said was true. Kind and patient to all, for some of his penitents he prescribed the remedy of hairshirts and scourges. Out from these massive bulwarks of stone peered formidable artillery batteries and sentinel boxes, where watchmen scoured the horizon for an enemy sail. According to reports Medina faces up to 35 years to life in prison for the murder. However, the consideration of the problem of his wife and family, who would resent the temporal loss that would go with his renouncing of the Church of England, prevented the weak man from doing his duty to God right away, though he did promise to do so before he died. He, his wife, and daughter settled in St. Joseph's Parish in St. Louis, Missouri. Fruits, preserves, and sweet-cakes were distributed to give them strength, and wines and liquors were given them to numb their pain and drive out their extreme despondency. PO Box 6016. Mary Theresa has worked a miracle for me." Upon hearing the commotion, the doctors ran to the ward and were dumbfounded. I love Thee very much, and he would have them repeat it many times over, I love Thee much, very, very much, while striking their breasts, his face and theirs bathed in tears. If their depraved keepers were particularly cruel, they left the dead as they were, chained to the living, below the decks, where no fresh air could enter to relieve them even slightly. Coming quickly upstairs, Brother Nicolas found Claver on the floor, having passed from this life to the next. And the saint prayed hard. The holy man had no time to lose. The beauty of the world; that thus I may with joy and courtesy go on my way. One of his linguistic gems was Calepino, a veritable genius, who spoke eleven different African dialects. 2 Now a man crippled from birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those going into the temple courts. In this case, the dignitary was the governor himself, Don Jeronimo Zueso Cassola, the same man who raced to tell Father Claver the good news. The fever of discovery proved, unfortunately, the beginning of the extermination of the native peoples. 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