A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Our lord said to his disciples, do you hear me? I say, love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, and, pray for those who maltreat you.
When someone slaps you on one cheek, turn and give him the other. When someone takes your coat, let him have your shirt as well. Give to everyone who begs from you. When a man takes what is yours, do not ask for it back. Do to others what you would have them do to you.
If you love those who love you, what credit is it? Even sinners do that. If you do good to those who do good to you, how can you claim any credit? Sinners do as much. If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what merit is there in that?
Even sinners lend to sinners expecting to be paid in full. Love your enemy and do good. Lend without expecting repayment, and then your recompense will be great. You will rightly be called sons of the most high since he himself is good to the ungrateful and even to the wicked. Be compassionate as your father in heaven is compassionate.
Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Pardon, and you shall be pardoned. Give, and it shall be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.
For the measure that you measure out will be measured back to you. And this is the good news of the lord. Praise the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Wearing white vestments, the feast of Saint Peter Claver, Jesuit, Cartagena, Columbia, born in the latter part of the sixteenth century and died in the seventeenth.
He was probably I'm not too sure of this, but he was among if not the first, he was among the first priests ordained in the new world. A Jesuit came from Barcelona, Spain, where his memory is still very green. And in Cartagena, I can assure you after being there 16 times, his memory is very green there. They're very proud of him. Now here's a controversial figure.
You see, there are some very good people who don't think much of Saint Peter Claver. You know what he did. Remember, he was a Jesuit, and he was sent over to Cartagena where the Jesuits had church. Important the very the is stands is out on the horizon. And His body is a there.
So the the here the school and the church was up there on the hill, a good, earnest, devoted, committed Jesuits teaching the young men of the gentry. And then down at the water's edge is where the port was. And Cartagena, as you know, was one of the three great ports of entry for slaves and for other European goods. It was a great seaport and extremely fortified town. If any of you have been down there to buy emeralds, you know that.
It's probably the most spectacular and preserved fortified city in the New World, if not in the old too. It's enormous. Now here's what Peter did. He was absolutely against the tide. He was supposed to be dedicating his life to the education of of young men from the best families.
Instead of that, he devoted his life to the bringing in of these slaves. Now remember when those when those people arrived down there, they had been in a ship for weeks without clothing, under very hard most of the time they were confined under decks, and these ships were pretty small, piled in there so that when they arrived in Cartagena, they were in pretty bad shape, as bad as some of the Irish who came over in the in the potato famine and landed in New York and Philadelphia. So what he did, this young Jesuit, was absolutely contrary to what he ought to have been doing. He ought to been sitting behind a desk in a well pressed cassock teaching and he was a brilliant sort of a guy too, extremely well educated. Instead of that, he broke the ranks, was an embarrassment to his community because he he behaved in very funny ways.
The one of the things that I remember from reading his life was here these good Jesuits were all in the in their dining room called the refectory having lunch with all due decor, with somebody reading and everybody's song. And in marches old man Peter Claver carrying a mattress, walks through the refectory on his way down to take the mattress to some slaves. That wasn't supposed to be done. It was a little disconcerting to the meal. Some of them got indigestion, I think, afterwards.
Anyway, what he did was to meet the ships. You could see them coming in. They had to go all the way around to the inlet so they had plenty of time. And he would be down there with his with some associates with baskets baskets of of fruit fruit and other things that he could gather in any way could that he could offer to these slaves coming in. Now here's something that most people don't know.
Most of those black people coming in from Africa and landing in Cartagena, they were fully convinced that they were being being brought over here to be eaten. They were scared that's what they fully expected happened, that they'd be slaughtered and then eaten by the good people of the new world. So they were scared to death. They had no ways of communication until he set up a a program well, not a program. He'd had no programs.
Until he got a couple now notice this, of slaves himself. And then try he taught them Spanish, and they taught him a a little bit of their language. So he had some of these interpreters, but they were his slaves. He owned slaves or somebody owned them. He had the use of them.
Now you see, people today object to remember, this is now 19 the twentieth century. We're talking about the seventeenth. That it's true that he was he was as generous as he could be. He was as thoughtful as he could be. He did everything he could for those poor people who were come being brought over here and slammed down along the ice.
When I first went down there, some of the pens were still in existence. Pretty well crumbled, but there you could still see the it was a miserable conditions. But you see what they what the critics in the twentieth century said, what did he do against slavery? He never uttered a word against slavery. He never moved his little finger to eliminate the whole awful system of slaves.
So they damned him to hell. Well, you have to make your own mind up about that. I'm not not up here to settle it. But the thing is, and this is beyond dispute, he did what he could do for those living human beings who were brought into Cartagena in miserable shape. That's what he did.
He didn't set up and he did he wasn't in some plush office writing out fine pieces of paper on the evils of slavery. He was down there in the water, in the mud, in the stinking stench of the of the pens down along the water's edge with a with a dying, there were always a few who were dying, doing his best with the food and stuff that he could collect to help these individual human beings. That's what he tried to do and gave his life for. Incidentally, there's another thing that he did that was very awful for the gentry of the time. When people were condemned to die, to be hanged, he was up there on the gallows with them.
That would that didn't go down well either with his fellow Jesuits. He wasn't popular with his colleagues. I don't know why, of course. He was a very difficult man to live with, you know. He was so eccentric.
He actually did try to do all he could do for the slaves. But now here is the whole point of this thing. He didn't do this out of philanthropy, out of love of man. He did it out of love of God. Now this is the whole point.
He was not a great philanthropist. He was a man of immense charity. He loved those slaves because he saw them as children of God. And while he went down there and even put his own clothes in the mud so the dying could at least have a something under them to die on, where he built little fires with a smoke or aromatic stuff you throw in to try to ease their last days. What he was doing all of this in order to teach them catechism.
Now that's another thing that a lot of these people don't like today. See, you're not supposed to have doctrine. We have education now. We don't have the confronting of Christian doctrine anymore. He he he organized, got ahold of these interpreters, and then through the interpreters, after he had done what he could to give them some fruits, some juices, bread, and stuff, then he would try as best he could to talk with them about Christ, to get them to to acknowledge their sins, to make acts of contrition, and then he baptized them.
And according to his figures, there is he baptized enormous number of people. He's criticized for that too. Remember, just about this business of criticizing the saints. When our holy father wanted to visit visit ours, where Saint John Vianney made his name, a lot of the priests there begged the holy father not to go there because they didn't think ours the curry of ours was a good representative of the priesthood. Think about it.
Anyway, that's what that's what Saint Peter Claver did. He had the immortal destiny, these people at heart. All he did for them physically was to that end. And when he baptized them, he he had little medals or something he'd put around their necks. Now criticize him if you want.
The church has passed judgment. He's a saint. Now that doesn't mean we have to imitate him. It doesn't mean we have to agree with every all of them. It doesn't mean anything except that the church has certified officially that he is a certified saint.
I think he was pretty great. I he follows my philosophy of life, do what you see needs doing. These people who'd say, well, I don't know the will of god. They're afraid to look right at their feet because often that's where the will of god is, the next step. And often we don't like it.
We don't like that step. It's not glamorous. It's not spectacular. And just as soon as I said that I I the thought came, all of these people have left who left the classrooms after Vatican two. Don't blame it on Vatican two, merely a chronological date.
And left the classroom to go out and to save the poor, to build buildings and all that. That's all fine good work, but you don't have to be even a Christian to do it. But you can't teach Christ in a classroom without being a Christian. And as I said that, I mean, I thought of sister Alice Therese who died, you know, the other morning. Her funeral incidental will be at 10:00.
When I think of my own experience here in this parish, of the number of lives that that good lady touched, I don't think she wrote any books, she didn't read any write any manifestation manifestos on Catholic education. She simply stuck to her job as a leader of the youth to Christ and she succeeded. And so I come back to old Peter Klabert. There's his dome on the skyline of the gorgeous city of the old of Cartagena. He's very much remembered today.
Some of them remember him with a great deal of pejority criticism. Others with the church glorify him as a saint. And all I can say is Saint Peter Claver, pray for us. In the name of the father and of the son, the holy spirit, amen.