Sept. 9: ST. PETER CLAVER, PRIEST. Pope Leo XIII sent a golden coffin for his remains along with a pipe organ which sits in the choir loft of the Church to this day. The following prayer service is an adaptation of the Liturgy of the Hours, and can be prayed individually or with a group. Health Like a mother, he would press their deformed frames to his, encouraging them to endure their purgatory here so that they might cross directly to heaven at death, for paradise was so close. So Claver gave it none- except what was absolutely necessary to sustain life. Such demonic phenomena were not uncommon among the uncivilized races. He gulped his final breath of air lying in the arms of his confessor. The Catholic Church venerates St. Peter Claver as the patron saint of African Americans and slaves, but Claver himself was neither. Father Claver applied himself for seven long years to the slave apostolate before he took his final vows in the Society. It was here at this holy sanctuary, high on a mountain in Catalonia that the founder of the Society of Jesus signified his complete conversion, by laying his soldiers sword down at the feet of the famous Madonna. 10 Old Ipswich Road. Europeans and their ways, even their religion, met with suspicion and, in instances, outright hostility among some of the natives of the New World. This miraculous healing led to the canonization of Peter Claver as a saint of the Catholic Church. He was canonized at the same time as his friend St. Alphonsus Rodriguez in 1888 and he was declared by Pope Leo XIII patron of all missionary enterprises among blacks in whatever part of the world. The dignified old man appeared, wearing a long white beard, and Claver, having been apprised of the customary signs of English protocol, saluted the prelate with much respect and offered a toast to his health. Always he spoke of God He was humble. In addition, the man of God found time to organize a talented black choir. He felt he had no grace to encourage someone else to carry a cross that he himself wasnt carrying. It was an era of expansion. Near the confessional he also had holy books with pictures of the Passion, which he insisted that all the people ponder before they confessed. How many more miracles have taken place in connection with this church over the past 150 years, no one knows. 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. He was born in 1580 into a prosperous farming family in the Spanish village of Verdu, Catalua. Africa was literally exploding in violence. Heartfelt thanks for your prayers for our daughter during her recent serious illness. The diocese writes: Dear Frs & Srs, Sr. Milagrine Dantas Fatima Sister from Sawantwadi, Sindhudurg along with two other Fatima Sister and their Parish Priest and other two persons met with an fatal accident as truck rams into their four wheeler at Shillong. Saint Peter Claver Church was established in 1931 to serve the African American community of greater Montclair, New Jersey. RIVERVIEW QLD 4303 College Reception Hours. He was as Arnold Lunn puts it, a divinitarian. The gift he gave the poor slaves was a gift infinitely more precious than sympathy, or even a miraculous cure (which he was quite often the instrument of). Be at my window and direct me through when the vision blurs From out of the blue. Nothing in Clavers scholastic training, outside of a sincere heart, prepared him for what he would meet on the docks, in the holes of ships and in the slave markets. One by one, the religious and the Negroes clasped his feet, which were giving off such a heavenly fragrance, and bathed them with their kisses. Only three times in those four years of his last tribulation did he leave the monastery. There were fugitives of all sorts, despairing failures of fortune, pirates, bigamists who had abandoned wife and home, money-hungry merchants, retired soldiers, heretics, Mohammedans, all varieties of Europeans, Jews, Greeks, and of course, native Indians, mestizos, mulattos, and last and saddest of all, the black slaves. During the time that the blacks spent in the sheds, they were penned so closely that they had to sleep almost upon one another and, thereby, freely handed on their diseases nonetheless, Claver was seen caring for the bodies of the sick and the souls of all. 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. There were times when the streets of Cartagena and other more viable settlements would flow with blood from such cruel assaults. Author and Publisher - Catholic Online His bedroom and the room where he died are also preserved to this day in the same place. People who were so horribly afflicted that they were actually shunned by their fellow lepers. This collection, which dates from 1904 to 2009, with bulk dates of 1980 to 1994, consists of records and materials evidencing the workings of the church and its community, primarily . The soil of Clavers soul was fertile and moist. The piercing sunken eyes of the padre read instantly the news in the messengers excited face, Its a slave ship, Father! Suddenly the grave expression of the priest changed into joy His whole countenance beamed as if he had seen a vision. But what made this Jesuit in Cartagena a saint was not only his detachment from the world and attachment to Christ, but along with that, an astounding ability to reduce potency to act. In college, Claver met Alphonsus Rodriguez who was a porter at the college and that meeting was to set the direction of Peter Clavers life thereafter. So many who perish, not because they seek their own loss, but because no effort is made to save them. Asare-Dankwah, 62, has denied the rape accusation. During prayer at night he added a crown of thorns and a rope tied around his neck in imitation of his beloved Savior bound and led to Pilate. Taking his beloved pupil aside, the humble teacher of saints (many great missionaries were guided by Rodriguez) spoke with authority: I cannot express to you the sorrow that I feel at seeing that God is unknown to the greater part of the world. He shortly afterwards heard the confession of Doa Isabella, and told her it was for the last time, and on September 6, after assisting at Mass and receiving holy communion, Claver said to his dear friend, Brother Nicholas Gonzalez, I am going to die. That same evening he was taken very ill and became comatose. Copyright 2004-2020 Saint Benedict Center, Richmond, New Hampshire. With him were the merchant and some curious companions. Due to the importance of this apostolate, Rome was willing to allow an exception to its canon forbidding clerics to own slaves. I will send more when I can. Slavery is not the subject of this article; however, before going on, the reader should at least divest himself of any false notion liberals may have implanted in him that the system was localized in the Americas. Africans at that time were abused because they were backward and exploitable, not because they were black. The ship would then be loaded up with the extracted gold and silver and other new-world products destined for Spain. And for the longest time no one but God and the saints of heaven knew what the holy man was going through. One he always made use of was a very amateurish, one might even respectfully say ugly, representation of the Judgment. He embraced lepers, kissed cancerous lesions, sucked out poison from running ulcers, washed the unclean and dined in their unsightly hovels, nor did he refrain even from eating food some despairing suicidals had rejected from their own mouths, in his determination to gain their confidence. He became the prophet and miracle worker of New Granada, the oracle of Cartagena, and all were convinced that often God would not have spared the city save for him. Saint Paul, who never actually condemned slavery as such, nevertheless elevated the slave as equal in Gods eyes to the free, thereby inflicting slavery with a mortal wound. If the glory of Gods house concerns you, go to the Indies and save millions of these perishing souls.. The good governor also told the fathers that the city was going to defray the cost of the obsequies by which the people of Cartagena planned to honor their most distinguished citizen. After Easter Peter Claver was back on the road instructing newly-arrived slaves and tending the sick. The dead man had assured him that he and his converted fellow countrymen were saved only because they had abandoned their errors and embraced the Catholic religion. St. Peter Claver (1580-1654), whose memorial we celebrate today, offers a timely witness as our nation reckons anew with the enduring scourge of racism. This extreme wealth passing in and out of the port was what attracted the avaricious entrepreneurs to settle there. Another saint whom he had known at school in Majorca, Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez, revealed his road in life to him. The slave ship, having been anchored in the harbor, suddenly had its hatch yanked open and the light of the sun flooded in upon the prisoners wretchedness. It officially closed in. Episode 361: Whether God Exists? the Five Proofs, The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Outside the Church there is no Salvation (Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus), Saint Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire, Brother Francis, M.I.C.M. And the eighty-year-old saint of Palma instantly recognized the sanctity he saw in the twenty-five year old Peter Claver. I love Thee very much. Suddenly the girl who had been dead sat up and vomited a large quantity of blood. He is the patron saint of Colombia, slaves, missionary work to Africans, and seafarers. According to reports Medina faces up to 35 years to life in prison for the murder. Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644), while Claver was a young man, had issued a papal decree prohibiting slavery, nevertheless, slavery continued in the business of the New World. Three . The Sisters of St Peter Claver were founded by Blessed Theresa Ledchowska. The Catholic Church venerates St. Peter Claver as the patron saint of African Americans and slaves, but Claver himself was neither. St. Christo, A Catholic Priest and 3 Nuns were Killed in a Car Accident in India. Experiences like this were fairly common at the college with Brother Rodriguez, for his ecstasies were frequent and often public. Often the skin on the backs and shoulders of those too weak to help themselves would be worn to the very bone from the constant motion of the waves and rubbing of their flesh on the damp planks.Apparently these slave hustlers were the very dregs of Christian Europe. Apostolate It contains many works of art. Junior Knights and Junior Daughters of KPC, Inc. Claver knew that the blacks were never going to see in their lifetime much, if any, material happiness on earth, certainly not the pie-in-the-sky utopias of Karl Marx and his disciple, Martin Luther King, Jr. The Miracle That Led To St. Peter Claver's Canonization. Because it is an excellent building material, miners started excavating the mountain some 1,000 years ago. Having baptized the dying and given his first attentions to the sick, the black-robed angel of mercy gathered all the slaves together and begun to speak to them of God. The riches of those countries are prized whilst the peoples are despised. He never bothered philosophizing about the evils of a system, while planting class hatred and bitterness, as the Socialists of our day do. Saint Peter's Mount consists of limestone, which is called 'mergel' in Limburg. It seemed that the blacks under Father Claver were destined to keep the straight and narrow. History: The son of a Catalonian farmer, was born at Verdu, in 1581. He was an early Pioneer for Human Rites and showed. Claver was not always well received. Claver was a man who knew pain and knew its value. Everything to that time was old. He had a steady confidence that God would care for them and, not his least worry were the slave owners whom he did not deem beyond the mercy of God. Peter Claver was born in 1581 to a devout farming family in the Catalonia region of Spain. Brother Alonso, as the Spaniards called him, not only held the key to the college, but he also had the key to Peter Clavers heart. Then he would go unperturbed into a more remote area in order to console the more pathetic cases. From whom does the devil want to divide Jesus? Little is known of his early years. We had to force our way through the crowd until we reached the sick. PO Box 6016. Saint Christopher's Protection Prayer Dear Saint Christopher, protect me today in all my travels along the road's way. The saint spent every day in the confessional from sunrise until twelve noon. History has since criticized that era for its lack of certain principles of human rights and human dignity. There were adulterers, Jewish usurers, and occasionally a deranged spellcaster or two. All they could muster was to protest and devote themselves to individual ministrations, physical, spiritual and material, to the tens of thousands of suffering human beings brought to these shores. The missionaries expenses were paid for by the Catholic King, Philip III, who had requested from all his provinces at least one priest to be sent to the recently established kingdom of New Granada (Colombia) across the ocean. At three oclock in the morning he entered the church. When he is despised and neglected, he is still dumb. A priest was baptizing Negroes with the Blood. That era of conquest was bereft of strands of a moral conscience, indeed a social ethic that would have troubled to its foundations the insidious business of the slave trade. Robert J. Miller in his 2007 Book, Both Prayed to the Same God, researched that: The Africans came from a vast region of Western Africa stretching inland for two to three hundred miles. The Catholic Church enjoyed an uneasy peace throughout Europe in the 1600s. The holy man seemed to touch everyone. St. Peter Claver Church maintains its position as a beacon of hope in the Treme Area and is one of the largest Black Catholic parishes in Louisiana. There was hardly a Pope who had to face the problem when it surfaced after about a thousand-year dormation, that did not condemn it. There never was slavery more inhuman, more murderous and more complete over the souls as well as the bodies of its victims than what we have seen in our century in those countries swallowed up by the Communists. All it needed was this seed from the wise master, Alonso. They knew he meant what he said and what he said was true. The crude picture graphically portrayed the Crucified Christ with His Precious Blood pouring from His Wounds into a basin. Funk, Motown, Pop, Pop Soul, Quiet Storm, Soul, Southern Soul, R&B, Brill Building Pop, Rhythm And Blues, and Classic Soul. Into these yards Peter Claver plunged with medicines and food, bread, brandy, lemons, tobacco to distribute among them, some of whom were too frightened, others too ill to accept them. St Peter Claver College. Claver did all he could to provide for the observance of these laws, and every spring after Easter he would make a tour of those plantations nearer Cartagena in order to see how his Africans were fairing under their masters. He prayed, slept, walked, labored, and preached in them for forty long years. In 1853, Ignatius Strecker, a native of Germany, arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife and nine children. His Mass, which followed, was deliberately short. In Christianity, foremost of the apostles.His name was Simon but according to the gospels Jesus called him from his work as fisherman and gave him the name 'Cephas', the Aramaic equivalent of Greek 'Peter' (petra, 'rock').According to early tradition Peter visited Rome where he was martyred (1 Clement 5, etc. to peoples judged, by the impoverished social consciousness of that time, substandard in their origin, purpose and development. Federal Tax Identification Number: 81-0596847. The U.S. bishops have invited Catholics to observe the day with fasting and prayer for an end to racism in the United States. He joined the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), and after his novitiate in Taragona was sent to the college of . Then we sat, or rather knelt beside them and bathed their faces and bodies with wine. The fleet of three galleons set sail on April 10, 1610. He brought them anything they desired: tobacco, sweets, good books, cakes, even paper and a pen to write letters with. Some were so debased as to sell their own children for gain. Instantly his conscience accused him, and ashamed of his cowardice, he retired to a corner of the room and delivered himself a brutal scourging, confessing all the while his fault in not loving enough one who was redeemed by the Precious Blood of Christ. mountelizabeth.com.sg. The religious there used to say that their welcome friend, Father Claver, did the work of forty men. So, from Jesuit priestly ranks arose this dreamer, the young man Peter Claver, of upper middle class bearing, born in the city of Verdu in Catalonia about the year 1581. Nor did he cease consoling them with kind words and gestures, for the Negroes all had one beautiful trait in common; they were extremely sensitive to a harsh word or a kind one. New lands to the west crossing the Atlantic Ocean had been discovered two hundred years previous. It is a fact as marvelous as it was true, that while Father Claver labored in Cartagena, not one Moslem went to his grave without first embracing the Catholic Religion. He labored unceasingly for the salvation of the African slaves and the abolition of the Negro slave trade, and the love he lavished on them was something that transcended the natural order. The convicts had common morning and evening prayer, litanies and the daily Rosary. Too bad todays social experts werent around in the seventeenth century to help the slaves. Many of the lepers could not speak at all; they could only look at him, if they had eye, and touch the tears on his cheeks while they moaned some sort of guttural, Thank you.. Famous actor and producer, Mark Wahlberg, age 51, went on NBC's the Today Show to discuss Lent. Exploiters of the Indians are instruments of Satan for the forced servitude of human beings of any race, Christian or not, is a thing abhorrent and damnable. Unfortunately, the Pope was far away from the scene of the crime nor was his strength in arms, but rather in the faith of his subjects, who chose at times to ignore him. Only death could drag hi away. At the end of the Masses, a group of distinguished men approached the casket. Those who were baptized looked beautiful and happy, while those who were not, looked ugly and were about to be gobbled up by hideous monsters from hell. One shipload would average between five and six hundred blacks from as many as fifteen or twenty African nations or tribes. Names like Francis Xavier, Francis Borgia, Robert Bellarmine, Alphonsus Rodriguez, Peter Canisius, Aloysius Gonzaga, John Francis Regis, and Andrew Bobola gave testimony to the good foundation laid by a wise father who was shortly to be canonized.

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