If you donate just $5.00, the price of your coffee, Catholic Online School could keep thriving. Jesuits were already ministering in North America among the Great Lakes native peoples on up through Canada. Peter Claver was seventy-one years old. The following prayer service is an adaptation of the Liturgy of the Hours, and can be prayed individually or with a group. The other priests would then carry him to his cell where, when he revived, the saint would refresh himself with a good scourging and some mental prayer. Someone told the saint about their plight. He was unable to take a step. When the Jesuits finally succeeded in establishing a proper place for the body in the church, the Augustinians came and took over the exhausting job of guarding the casket. It was 1602 when he entered their Novitiate in Tarragona. Their bodies were hastily thrown overboard to the sharks. A St. Peter Claver Catholic Church member burns incense as a part of the church's first Senor de Los Milagros (Lord of Miracles) celebration procession in Tyler on streets near the church. He was born in 1580 into a prosperous farming family in the Spanish village of Verdu, Catalua. He broke every rule in the book. How difficult was his task in teaching is shown by the fact that at baptism each batch of ten catechumens was given the same name to help them to remember it. All these poor creatures had, was a fire-and-brimstone Jesuit, and he wanted to save them from an eternal misery. O, holy brother of my soul, what a field lies here opened to your zeal! He had felt the nails, he had habitually endured the bitterness of lifes vinegar and gall, he had been mocked; but as yet Claver was never alone. What sort of a man must I be, that I cannot do a little good without causing so much confusion? Claver would ask. There were some whose diseases were so repulsive that no one but Father Claver had the supernatural guts to nurse them. 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. A year later he was ordained. Until death! the good father quietly responded. Saint Melania, a wealthy Roman matron, freed her 8,000 slaves at once. The supreme charity of our saint was most vividly portrayed in his solicitude for the sick; and Cartagena, in its infant years, had plenty of sick and very sick people. It was now 1654. Falling down before him, the veteran apostle kissed his feet. Were it not for a miracle, the poor Father, to the very end a victim to the devils rage, would have been tossed off and perhaps killed. They provided no religious instruction or ministration for their slaves, no alleviation of their physical condition, so that the sacrament of baptism became to the slaves, unfortunately, a sign and symbol of their oppression and wretchedness instead of their salvation. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free; there is neither male nor female; For you are all one in Christ Jesus. Gal 3:27-28. Nor can the Africans themselves escape the blame. The young Jesuit petitioned his superiors to be sent to the missions of the West. 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. At that moment. They turned their eyes to Africa to find that labor force. It was a face that betrayed the worn-out condition of his entire body. Which of them had been baptized in Africa? People who truly love God never put on artificial airs of piety, folding their hands and bowing their heads, while they shun sinners as if they were to be despised. When we approached their quarters, we thought we were entering another Guinea. Many of these poor unfortunates had been torn from their families in their prime of life. A priest was baptizing Negroes with the Blood. Two orders, the Trinitarians and the Order of Mercy had this for their object. Due to the importance of this apostolate, Rome was willing to allow an exception to its canon forbidding clerics to own slaves. Many an ivory cheek ran with tears as the Spaniards listened in wonder to the angelic voices of the slaves resounding from the walls of the Jesuit Church with an incomparably touching rendition of the Dies Irae or a triumphant Gloria. After this we began an elementary instruction about baptism, that is, the wonderful effects of the sacrament on body and soul. As his faithful friend and companion, Brother Nicholas, helped him into a bed, the saint moaned, This sickness is the reward for my sins. By this time the slave trade had been established in the Americas for nearly a hundred years and the port of Cartagena was one of its principal centers, being conveniently situated as a clearing house for auctions and sales. But what a retched lot was that of the poor slaves! Let us begin, In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. 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. 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 soil of Clavers soul was fertile and moist. Episode 364: What Is the Point of Lent? In fact, two Popes, Pius I and Callistus I, had at one time been slaves. Peter Claver was spiritually mailed to the Cross of Jesus in Cartagena. The rumor of his approaching death spread around the city like wildfire, everyone suddenly remembered the saintly priest again, and numbers came to kiss his hands before it was too late; his room was stripped of everything that could be carried off as relics. Arouse guilt? He first asked them for their babies so that he might poor the saving water of Baptism upon them; then, seeking out the dying, he spoke to them by way of interpreters, and obtaining their consent, he baptized them too. His fellow Jesuits, having been reduced to an extreme poverty, were so busy with their individual responsibilities that days would pass without anyone even visiting him. Surely this man deserved some consideration, some appreciation for all he had done in Gods service. St. Peter Claver's work came to an end with his death on September 8, 1654. He performed no important negotiations, established or reformed no religious order, made no brilliant changes of places or circumstances. The saint would never complain. Built between 1580 and 1654, the structure features an imposing stone facade, yet the interior glows with the rich colors filtered through its stained glass windows. Well, the good influence proved too much. At the age of twenty he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Tarragona. And to save many souls.. A sign of new things over the horizon was registered in the coined term The New World. Peter obeyed, and in 1610 landed at Cartagena, where for forty-four years he was the Apostle of the negro slaves. 36 St Peter Claver by Shining Light Dolls on desktop and mobile. It was an era of expansion. Across the sea a ship arose on the horizon. A Sister of St. Peter Claver. Give your warning sign if danger is near so that I may stop while the path is clear. St. Christo, A Catholic Priest and 3 Nuns were Killed in a Car Accident in India. While he was studying philosophy at Majorca in 1605, Alphonsus Rodriguez, the saintly door-keeper of the college, learned from God the future mission of his young associate, and thenceforth never ceased exhorting him to set out to evangelize the Spanish possessions in America. The medal had the Holy Name of Jesus on one side and of Mary on the other. Robert J. Miller in his 2007 Book, Both Prayed to the Same God, researched that: The Africans came from a vast region of Western Africa stretching inland for two to three hundred miles. The young student at Barcelona decided to do more than just to benefit from the Jesuits education. Whether the saint could bilocate or not isnt known, but whenever the slaves got out of line in the city, the watchful shepherd inevitably showed up to put the fear of God back into them. Exploiters of the Indians are instruments of Satan for the forced servitude of human beings of any race, Christian or not, is a thing abhorrent and damnable. Unfortunately, the Pope was far away from the scene of the crime nor was his strength in arms, but rather in the faith of his subjects, who chose at times to ignore him. Whole parts of their bodies were eaten away by the dreadful disease; some had lost limbs, others had loose parts of their faces; some had scarcely any resemblance to a human exterior remaining, and the odor emanating from their many sores was the worst the apostle anywhere encountered. For two months, these blacks had been chained and shackled below deck in a floating hell, the men in one compartment, the women in another. In the forty years of Saint Peter Clavers labor, this ecclesiastical office only sentenced two men to death, and sad to say, only one of these incorrigibles died repentant; the other departed the world uttering vicious blasphemies. Some cases involved actual diabolic manifestations. These heroic acts of sublime love for his neighbor were by no means natural to Claver. Peter, St. 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 Novitiate in Tarragona was to our young novice a foretaste of the delights of the blessed in paradise. The saints searches for the sick and the abandoned took him frequently to the beaches, where occasionally, some poor aged or hopelessly maimed Negro would be dumped off by a heartless master to die. Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644), while Claver was a young man, had issued a papal decree prohibiting slavery, nevertheless, slavery continued in the business of the New World. Cartagena needed a saint. He would also use pictures in his teaching, primarily images of the crucified Christ. The Superior of the college arranged for the two of them to spend fifteen minutes a day conversing about spiritual things. He kept a strict account of each and every slave he baptized. St Peter Claver College. As one biographer put it, Like the Cid, even the dead corpse of Claver conquers the Moors.. They had no charitable funds at their disposal, no plaudits from well-disposed audiences; they were hampered and discouraged by the owners and often rebuffed by the slaves themselves. Suddenly the girl who had been dead sat up and vomited a large quantity of blood. Like a mother, he would press their deformed frames to his, encouraging them to endure their purgatory here so that they might cross directly to heaven at death, for paradise was so close. . The son of a Catalonian farmer, was born at Verdu, in 1581; he died 8 September, 1654. As the affable Jesuit ate and drank nd conversed with the delighted crew, the Englishmen, somewhat won over already by his manners, so contrary to what they had heard of Jesuits, requested that the priest meet their venerable archdeacon, who happened to have been captured along with them. PETER CLAVER, PRIEST. They discovered a God, a gentle Savior, and a theology of history, that could help make sense of their enslavement. Claver couldnt remove the cross but he could make it sweet. Daring explorers had sailed west and conquered new territories for the crown. Copyright 2004-2020 Saint Benedict Center, Richmond, New Hampshire. 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