St. Peter Claver

Born in Verdú in Catalonia in 1580, Claver entered the Society of Jesus and was sent to New Granada, arriving at Cartagena (one of the principal ports of the Atlantic slave trade) in 1610. He was ordained there in 1616.

Thousands of enslaved Africans were landed at Cartagena each year, many of them dying in transit or shortly after arrival.

Claver's method was concrete: when a ship arrived he went into the hold with food, water, medicine, and a group of interpreters he had trained, several of them formerly enslaved themselves, so that people could be spoken to in their own languages.

He tended wounds and dysentery, baptised those who asked for it, and pressed slave owners about the treatment of the people they held. He also visited the city's hospitals and prisons. He described himself in his vow as the slave of the Africans forever: a formula recorded in his religious profession.

In his last years he was largely paralysed and, by contemporary accounts, badly neglected: left in a cell and attended carelessly. He died on 8 September 1654. The city that had resented his interference turned out in force for his funeral.

He was canonised in 1888 by Pope Leo XIII, who also named him patron of missionary work among African peoples.

Claver did not abolish slavery, did not free the people he served, and worked inside a Church and empire that permitted the trade. Honest devotion to him has to say so.

Papal condemnations of the enslavement of peoples exist from the fifteenth century onward and were widely ignored; the Church's teaching and the Church's practice were not the same thing. Later popes, including Gregory XVI in 1839 and Leo XIII, condemned the trade explicitly.

People arriving in the holds of slave ships: sick, terrified, and without a shared language. Prisoners. Sailors. Patients in the city's hospitals, including those with Hansen's disease.