Be with you. A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus raised his eyes to his disciples and said to them, blessed are you poor, the reign of God is yours. Blessed are you who hunger, you shall be filled. Blessed are you who are weeping, you shall laugh.
Blessed shall you be when men hate you, when they ostracize you, and insult you, and prescribe your name as evil because of the son of man. On the day they do it, rejoice and exalt. For your reward shall be great in heaven. Thus, it was that their fathers treated the prophets. But woe to you rich, for your consolation is now.
Woe to you who are full, you shall go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, you shall weep in your grief. Woe to you when everybody speaks well of you. Their fathers treated the false prophets in just that same way. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit, amen. This gospel, this excerpt from Saint Luke recording a statement of our blessed lord was not picked for the feast of Saint Peter Claver. This excerpt from Saint Luke is for the for Wednesday of the twenty third week of the liturgical year. But it is most appropriate on this day that we recall Saint Peter Claver of the Society of Jesus, whose name, life is closely associated with Cartagena, Colombia, South America, and the slave trade. Now Ignatius Loyola died in 1556, And he came from an area up around the Northern North Eastern part of Spain, and when he saw the light, when he had this conversion whatever it was, he betook himself to Manresa, which is just a a good walk from a famous monastery of Montserrat, which is very close to Barcelona, just a short bus ride from Barcelona.
And it was from Barcelona that Peter Klaver came from that area, not from the city. The point I'm making, there is a point here. Believe it or not, it's not a travelogue. The point is that a Loyola's memory was green in Barcelona when Peter Klaver was growing up as a boy. Klaver was born in 1580, only twenty four years after Loyola's death.
So when when Claver came to Barcelona to continue his education, the memory of Loyola was green and very living. Peter Klaver met Jesuits who had known the founder Saint Ignatius. So that he became imbued with what I would say with the spirit of Ignatius firsthand. It wasn't ordained in Spain. He was shipped off to the new world, to Colombia, to Bogota, the capital.
And there he was ordained. The first Jesuit I think ordained in Colombia. Anyway, he he wasn't there long either when they shipped him north to Cartagena. Now Cartagena was one of the three important cities of what is called the Spanish Main. Because it was so traveled from the ships going from the new world back to Spain.
Taking the treasures of the new world, ill begotten I guess. But anyway you had three important cities. Portobello, Veracruz, and then Cartagena. Where the These were the three immensely important cities where the treasure treasuries or treasures were gathered. And then when the ships got all together then they sailed east back to Spain.
Now, of those three cities, the one that is the best preserved, almost impeccably preserved is Cartagena. And when you look at the city of Cartagena now, one of the first things you see is the spire of Saint Peter Church named after Saint Peter Claver. Because that's where he landed from Bogota, and that's where he spent his life with the slaves that were brought in to Cartagena. Because the slaves coming in constituted the most important importation, the traffic, the commerce of the day. And Cartagena was one of the the I guess it's safe to say, the the most prominent prominent in terms of the numbers that came in there.
The numbers of African slaves who were brought over to become the the help mates to the whites in the new world. Now, the Jesuits had already established a college there. They didn't go there to to work for the slaves or with the slaves or anything else. They went down there to establish a college which is still functioning. So when Peter Claver was ordained in Bogota was shipped down I mean shipped north.
That's north to get mixed up. To Cartagena, he was going to a college and a flourishing college in the seventeenth century, the early seventeenth century. Died in I think 1654. So that was his expectation. Now when he got there, he found himself right in the heart of this slave traffic.
The the the college, the residence for the Jesuit Jesuit now, you're only dealing a hundred years after less than a hundred years after Ignatius death is on a promontory and right down there is where the ships came in with bringing in the slaves and the slave pens were all around that area. The Bay Of Souls it's called. And the first time I was down there, the old wars were still visible. That whole area now has been removed and they're trying to redevelop it. But the thing is he was when he went to the to Cartagena to to participate in that college which was still very young and which was dedicated to educating the young the young sons of the Spanish people who were coming over to colonize Colombia.
Well, he was put right in the midst of the slave trade. Now, he didn't care much about the slave trade. What he saw were these men and women coming in there in the saddest, most revolting conditions you can imagine. Now this is no exaggeration. And I'm not the the fact is it had to be that way.
See, we think of the Queen Elizabeth going over to Africa bringing back slaves. Well, these were small ships. The decks were close together. And it it it you couldn't have a a good smelling ship under those conditions. You can't have a good smelling ship today down in the hole.
But anyway conditions were just about as deplorable as they could be. I'm not minimizing that at all. And all he saw was that something ought to be done for these people as people, as men and women who should be baptized. That was his main thrust. He wasn't a do gooder, quotation marks.
He wasn't a welfare worker. He wasn't a social worker. All he saw was that here were men and women who needed baptism to be made Christians, to be saved. This got him into trouble. Got him into big trouble.
Even with his own associates, they couldn't fathom him out either. This gospel today is most apocite because he wasn't highly praised in his lifetime even by his own associates. Because they said, how can you be doing all this? See, claims to have baptized about 300,000 slaves. Now you put that You do some arithmetic and figure that out.
That one that number has been seriously questioned. But he said it and he said he kept a record. He was baptizing them right and left. That's the first thing he would do. And he remember this, when this this is a huge This is one of the big criticisms against him.
When he did this, he did not do it through their ignorance. He had interpreters. As a matter of fact, he had his own slaves who were interpreters. So that there wasn't there was some instruction in every instance before he baptized them, but he did baptize them right and left. As I say, he claimed to baptize over 300,000.
That's a lot. Now, Peter Claver in his lifetime was a scandal to his own brethren. Give you one little instance. You can imagine these good serious professors sitting down at lunch. And in comes Peter with his mattress or what what he called his mattress.
It was nothing but a but an old dirty blanket that he slept on. Here he comes walking into the dining room or the refectory carrying his mattress. And he's begging he's begging the forgiveness of his community for some fault that he thinks he had done. Now what do you do with a man like that? I mean, he's downright embarrassing.
You might even spill your soup in the in the process. So you see, when we think of these men and women who have achieved these high levels of holiness. Remember, in their lifetime many of them were not esteemed in the highest order. I've just finished reading, well, guess you could call it an autobiography of of Catherine de Het Dorothy. Now, some of you may know she's still living.
She was a good friend of Dorothy Day who was much better known and Peter Moran who was much better known in this country. But read her life and see what what she was trying to do. She was about twenty years ahead of her time. But they chased her out of Canada. Then she came down to New York and established a house in in New York and then she was invited to leave there and went back to Canada.
Of course now now everybody prays with her. But believe me, she didn't get a whole lot of it when the going was really tough and rough. And so this Peter Klaver, well he was an odd character, there's no question. He would have been a very difficult man to live with. No question.
He didn't take baths regularly. And you know that is not down in the Arctic Circle when you're down in Cartagena. But he saw a need and did what he could and he not only went among these slaves when they were brought and when they were brought in, they were in terrible shape after a sea voyage when they were lying in between decks. It's impossible to imagine the squalor, the stench, even he was was nauseated and sickened by it many a time. You can't exaggerate these conditions.
And when he took he took not only the preparations for baptism, he also took preparations for extra emulsion because many of these people passed on to their reward immediately. But he also took things handy, any little thing that he could get a hold of, beg or get. He took that. He did what he could to ease their physical suffering. But that wasn't his main thrust.
His main thrust was to save these people for God, for Christ because he saw Christ in them. Now when he was on Majorca in the island down there in the Mediterranean taking making his novitiate. One of the great principles that he wrote down in which we still have was this. That he would try to seek God in everything and his Lord Jesus Christ in everything. You try that and you will see it will change your life.
In the name of the father, the son, holy spirit, amen.