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The saints

St. Peter Claver

The slave of the slaves, who met every slave ship in Cartagena with food and medicine.

Feast: 9 September · 1581 to 1654 · Reformation and missions · Cartagena, Colombia

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A plain typographic plate: St. Peter Claver, with the feast day.

Typographic plate by Stone & Incense: we found no public-domain image of this saint we could verify.

Home / The saints / St. Peter Claver

The harbor of Cartagena, 1610s

Cartagena was one of the main slave ports of the Americas, receiving thousands of enslaved Africans every year.1

Peter Claver, a Spanish Jesuit, signed himself the slave of the Africans forever.1

When ships came in, he went down into the holds with food, water and medicine.

Patron of Colombia1; African missions1; interracial justice1

01St. Peter Claver

Forty years

He nursed the sick, taught the faith through interpreters, and baptized many thousands.1

He spent his last four years sick and neglected, and died in 1654.1

Live it this week

Get close to someone others avoid

Peter went down into the holds. This week, visit someone society sidelines (a prisoner, a migrant, a person on the street) and treat them with full dignity.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Peter Claver”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.