St. Peter Claver (Sept 9th)

 

The Saints / Liturgical Feast Days celebrated this week include:

Sept 8^th – Birth of the B.V. Mary

Sept 9^th – St. Peter Claver

Sept 13^th – St. John Chrysostom

Sept 14^th – Exultation of the Cross

Sept 15^th – Our Lady of Sorrows 

Though the Feast, for us, the Solemnity Our Lady of Sorrows is the Principal Patronal Feast of my religious order, the Servants of Mary [US] [Int’l], for a reflection here I believe that both of the Saints remembered this week, St. Peter Claver and St. John Chrysostom offer better opportunities to do so here.

Then since I have spent a fair amount of time recently writing about saints from the Early Church / Patristic Era – St. Pontian and Hippolytus (Aug. 13th), St. Monica (Aug. 27^th) and St. Gregory the Great (Sept 3^rd) – I’ve decided to devote my time here to St. Peter Claver.

But first at least a few words about St. John Chrysostom…

St. John Chrysostom, ‘the golden-tongued,’ who lived from 437-407 A.D., gives us an early example of a Christian religious leader (he was Patriarch of Constantinople) challenging a nominally Christian ruler of the time, the Byzantine Emperor Arcadius, for which he was eventually banished.  When one looks at the apparent inability of Moscow’s Orthodox Patriarch Kyrill  to offer _any serious criticism_ to Russia’s current ruler, Vladimir Putin, one wonders what the ‘golden tongued’ would have thought about this.  At minimum it’s a missed opportunity for our brothers and sisters of the Eastern Church …

That said, now to St. Peter Claver …

He was born in 1580 to a prosperous family in Verdú, Spain.  After finishing his studies in nearby Barcelona, he entered into the Jesuits in still nearby Catalan Tarragona. 

Based on the stories he heard there from returning missionaries from the Americas, he volunteered for the missions and ended up in Cartagena, in the New Kingdom of Grenada, today’s Colombia. 

By then, Cartagena had become a center of the slave trade.  Though already condemned by numerous Popes, the trade continued for hundreds more years because of its profitability.   With the slave trade firmly ingrained in the culture and economy of the region, the future St. Peter Claver, continued and expanded a ministry begun by his mentor Alonso de Sandoval, baptizing the slaves as they arrived in Cartagena and then visiting them at the surrounding plantations in the trade’s off seasons (sea travel then was determined by the winds, and there were some seasons where travel was more favorable than others).

While serving the community of the slaves, that did not prevent him from ministering to others, often marginalized in other ways – muslims, condemned criminals, notorious sinners both poor and rich alike.

He became widely revered as a man who cared all who suffered around him, though no one ever mistook his primary interest in the enslaved.

He remains an inspiration for all those who seek to serve most downtrodden among us.  

St. Peter Claver's legacy in the United States:  Here in the United States, in the years following the founding of the Knights of Columbus movement, the African American Catholic community founded a parallel organization called the Knights of Peter Claver which remains the largest African American Catholic lay organization in the country.