St. Peter Claver was born in Spain in the year 1581 and joined the Jesuit order as a young man and was ordained to the priesthood in 1615. In 1610, Peter left his homeland of Spain to become a missionary in the Americas, he never returned home. St. Peter arrived in the Americas at the port of Cartagena in what is now Columbia. At this time Cartagena was one of the major centers of slave trade in the New World. When Peter Claver landed, he was struck by the plight of the slaves and decided to devote the rest of his life to them, calling himself "the slave of the slaves forever."
Peter decided to help the slaves in any way he could. Peter first ministered to their physical needs, then he ministered to their spiritual needs. When a new ship of slaves came into harbor, Peter would board it, go into the hold, and help the slaves. He started by giving them food, including bread and fruit, and drink, administered medicine to those who needed it, and offering brandy and tobacco to those who wanted it. Once physical needs were attended to, he began serving the slaves spiritually. Through interpreters, he instructed them in the faith, teaching about human dignity and God's saving love, he would then baptize the saves into the Catholic faith. In this way, he helped more than 300,000 souls.
After the slaves left the ships and were sold, he still worked to help them. He visited the plantations to continue teaching and to help physical needs, and he served as a thorn in the conscience of people dealing with the slave trade reminding them of their moral duties to fellow humans. After a drawn out sickness, Peter died on September 8, 1654. St. Peter Claver was canonized in 1888 by Pope Leo XIII. He is the patron of Columbia, and missionary work to black peoples.
To love God as He ought to be loved, we must be detached from all temporal love. We must love nothing but Him, or if we love anything else, we must love it only for His sake.
-Saint Peter Claver
Yesterday, May 30, 1627, on the feast of the Most Holy Trinity, numerous blacks, brought from the rivers of Africa, disembarked from a large ship. Carrying two baskets of oranges, lemons, sweet biscuits, and I know not what else, we hurried toward them. We had to force our way through the crowd until we reached the sick. Large numbers of the sick were lying on the wet ground or rather in puddles of mud. To prevent excessive dampness, someone had through of building up a mound with a mixture of times and broken pieces of bricks. This, then, was their couch, a very uncomfortable one not only for that reason, but especially because they were naked, without any clothing to protect them.
We laid aside our cloaks, therefore, and brought from a warehouse whatever was handy to build a platform. In that way we covered a space to which we at last transferred the sick, by forcing a passage through bands of slaves. Then we divided the sick into two groups: one group my companion approached with an interpreter, which I addressed the other group. There were two blacks, nearer death than life, already cold, whose pulse could scarcely be detected. With the help of a tile we pulled some live coals together and placed them in the middle near the dying men. Into this fire we tossed aromatics. Then, using our own cloaks, for they had nothing of the sort, and to ask the owners for others would have been a waste of words, we provided for them a smoke treatment, by which they seemed to recover their warmth, and the breath of life. The joy in their eyes as they looked at us was something to see.
This was how we spoke to them, not with words but with our hands and our actions. And in fact, convinced as they were that they had been brought here to be eaten, any other language would have proved utterly useless. Then we sat, or rather knelt, beside them and bathed their faces and bodies with wine. We made every effort to encourage them with friendly gestures and displayed in their presence the emotions which somehow naturally tend to hearten the sick.
After this we began an elementary instruction about baptism, that is, the wonderful effects of the sacrament on body and soul. When by their answers to our questions they showed they had sufficiently understood this, we went on to a more extensive instruction, namely, about the one God, who rewards and punishes each one according to his merit, and the rest. Finally, when they appeared sufficiently prepared, we told them the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Passion. Showing them Christ fastened to the cross, as he is depicted on the baptismal font on which streams of blood flow down from his wounds, we led them in reciting an act of contrition in their own language.
from a letter by Saint Peter Claver