St. Peter Claver (1580-1654) was a Spanish Jesuit who spent more than 40 years of his life ministering to African slaves trafficked through the Colombian port of Cartagena.

He entered the Society of Jesus at 20 and began his studies in Mallorca. The college porter, St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, helped guide the young man toward serving in the Spanish colonies of the New World. Claver went to Colombia to complete his Jesuit formation, where he also encountered the slave trade alive and well.

Although Pope Paul III had already condemned the slave trade, the Spanish administration encouraged it because Africans were better laborers in the lucrative mines of the Andes. About 1,000 slaves passed through Cartagena each month. Many died during passage but the profit margin and work productivity were so huge that the mortality could be written off.

The Jesuit made it a custom to visit slave ships when they docked in the port, bringing medicine, food and lemons with him. (Citrus fruits were vital after the long ocean voyage.) He did what he could to alleviate their physical situation and sought to evangelize them spiritually: it’s said he baptized more than 300,000 people in the course of his lifetime. He would make it a habit to visit those he baptized, if he could, annually, and preached missions in the city and countryside. Where he could, he pressed for slaves’ rights.

Worn out by four decades of these efforts, Claver spent his last four years in his parish room. When he died, the local authorities — who had previously deemed him a nuisance — ordered a solemn, mass public funeral. The hypocrisy matched the reception he often encountered in his life, where some Cartagena Catholics refused to deal with him because they claimed he “profaned” the sacraments by giving them to beings who “scarcely possessed a soul.” He was canonized, along with Alphonsus Rodriguez, in 1888.

Today’s painting is a local product from Cartagena, currently in the local “Palace of the Inquisition,” a history museum. Its author and date is unknown to me. It represents the kind of local, almost amateur art which might have once been found in the Spain’ colonies and ex-colonies. Claver looks up to heaven, asking the grace of baptism for the person he is about to baptize. His face also betrays the basic look of dissatisfaction about the limits of what he can do in a situation beyond his control. With one hand (and the end of a stole) he holds the unfortunate man, while the other holds the shell with water in which he will be baptized. Claver performed this act hundreds of thousands of times. In the background is the port and the detention area, with slaves on the dock over Claver’s left shoulder. Others are likely indistinct in the boat over his right shoulder. 

Claver’s work and his outreach to these marginalized peoples, these people on the peripheries, would certainly not have won him a following that would have memorialized him in a professionally sophisticated painting. Perhaps one might surmise that this artist recorded the saint for posterity out of respect and love for what he stood for.

The saint’s work was a challenge, because the goals of the state — even a Catholic state like Spain — and the Church do not always coincide, especially when one must make a choice between God and mammon. Claver did what he could in the midst of historic circumstances outside his control. At the same time, he brought his sons and daughters an invaluable gift: the freedom of the sons of God.

It would still take three centuries for much of the world to recognize the incongruity between human dignity and slavery, something Claver already knew. And slavery continues, in various forms under different names, today. Our own society, too, can be blind to its moral failings: I am certain there will be a day when people look back on the 20th and 21st century to ask, “How could they believe killing their unborn babies was a ‘human right?’” Perhaps we still have something to learn from Peter Claver: about persistence in our time and patience in God’s. 

(An interesting historical fact: did you know that the “Knights of Peter Claver” were founded in 1909 in Alabama by the Josephite Fathers as a kind of Knights of Columbus for “colored Catholics?” They still exist. Check them out here.)