St. Peter Claver

Feast date: Sep 09

On Sept. 9, the Catholic Church celebrates St. Peter Claver, a Jesuit missionary who spent his life in the service of African slaves brought against their will to South America during the 17th century.

Peter Claver was born into a farming family in the Spanish region of Catalonia during 1581. He studied at the University of Barcelona as a young man, and joined the Jesuits as a novice at the age of 20.

While studying philosophy in Tarragona, Peter developed a friendship with an older Jesuit lay brother, Alphonsus Rodriguez. Although Alphonsus spent his days doing menial work as a door-keeper, he had immense insight into spiritual matters and encouraged Peter to become a missionary in the Spanish colonies. Pope Leo XIII would later canonize both men on the same day, almost two centuries later.

In 1610, Peter Claver – now a priest – arrived in Cartagena, a port city in present-day Colombia. Despite Pope Paul III’s repeated condemnations of slavery during the previous century, European colonists continued importing African slaves, often sold by their own rulers, to work on plantations and in mines. Those who survived the ship journey could expect to be worked to death by their masters.

Peter was determined to sacrifice his own freedom to bring material aid and eternal salvation to the African slaves, in keeping with his vow to become “the slave of the blacks forever.” The young priest made and kept this resolution despite his own health problems (aggravated by Cartagena’s tropical climate) and the language barrier between himself and the population he served.

Many Spanish Royal officials in Cartagena appreciated Claver’s work, and made contributions toward the slaves’ relief and religious education. The slave traders, on the other hand, found the priest and his interpreters to be a nuisance. Meanwhile, some Spanish expatriates who sought out the priest because of his holy reputation, refused to enter the same church or confessional as the black slaves.

In order to minister to speakers of a foreign language, Claver often employed pictorial representations of Catholic truths. He also communicated by means of generosity and expressions of love, giving food and drink to the ailing workers and visiting them during bouts of sickness that often proved fatal.

“We must speak to them with our hands,” he reasoned, “before we try to speak to them with our lips.”

In keeping with his vow of “slavery,” Peter survived on minimal amounts of food and sleep. His life of humility and penance led to miraculous occurrences – as when he healed the sick with the touch of his cloak, or appeared surrounded by a supernatural light during his hospital visits.

St. Peter Claver’s work came to an end with his death on September 8, 1654. He had baptized and taught the faith to more than 300,000 slaves during his four decades in Cartagena.

During the Vatican’s Synod for Africa in 2009, Cartagena’s Archbishop Jorge Enrique Jiménez Carvajal lamented the fact that his city had been the center of an “awful commerce.”

But he spoke with gratitude for the fact that the same city had become the home of such a “great witness to sanctity,” the “apostle of the slaves, whose body rests in our cathedral, who lived to protect them and lead them towards the faith” in which they could experience God’s love.

The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Feast date: Sep 08

The Catholic Church celebrates today the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary on its traditional fixed date of September 8, nine months after the December 8 celebration of her Immaculate Conception as the child of Saints Joachim and Anne.

The circumstances of the Virgin Mary’s infancy and early life are not directly recorded in the Bible, but other documents and traditions describing the circumstances of her birth are cited by some of the earliest Christian writers from the first centuries of the Church.

These accounts, although not considered authoritative in the same manner as the Bible, outline some of the Church’s traditional beliefs about the birth of Mary.

The “Protoevangelium of James,” which was probably put into its final written form in the early second century, describes Mary’s father Joachim as a wealthy member of one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Joachim was deeply grieved, along with his wife Anne, by their childlessness. “He called to mind Abraham,” the early Christian writing says, “that in the last day God gave him a son Isaac.”

Joachim and Anne began to devote themselves extensively and rigorously to prayer and fasting, initially wondering whether their inability to conceive a child might signify God’s displeasure with them.

As it turned out, however, the couple were to be blessed even more abundantly than Abraham and Sarah, as an angel revealed to Anne when he appeared to her and prophesied that all generations would honor their future child: “The Lord has heard your prayer, and you shall conceive, and shall bring forth, and your seed shall be spoken of in all the world.”

After Mary’s birth, according to the Protoevangelium of James, Anne “made a sanctuary” in the infant girl’s room, and “allowed nothing common or unclean” on account of the special holiness of the child. The same writing records that when she was one year old, her father “made a great feast, and invited the priests, and the scribes, and the elders, and all the people of Israel.”

“And Joachim brought the child to the priests,” the account continues, “and they blessed her, saying: ‘O God of our fathers, bless this child, and give her an everlasting name to be named in all generations’ . . . And he brought her to the chief priests, and they blessed her, saying: ‘O God most high, look upon this child, and bless her with the utmost blessing, which shall be for ever.’”

The protoevangelium goes on to describe how Mary’s parents, along with the temple priests, subsequently decided that she would be offered to God as a consecrated Virgin for the rest of her life, and enter a chaste marriage with the carpenter Joseph.

Saint Augustine described the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary as an event of cosmic and historic significance, and an appropriate prelude to the birth of Jesus Christ. “She is the flower of the field from whom bloomed the precious lily of the valley,” he said.

The fourth-century bishop, whose theology profoundly shaped the Western Church’s understanding of sin and human nature, affirmed that “through her birth, the nature inherited from our first parents is changed.”

St. Cloud

Feast date: Sep 07

On Sept. 7, the Catholic Church honors the memory of Saint Clodoald, popularly known as Saint Cloud, who escaped from violent political intrigue to pursue holiness as a monk and priest.

Born in 522, Clodoald was the grandson of the Frankish King Clovis I, whose conversion to orthodox Christianity – rather than the Arian heresy – made him the first Catholic ruler of present-day France.

After Clodoald’s father Clodomir was killed in 524, he and his brothers Theudovald and Gunthar were raised by their grandmother Queen Clothilde, whom the Church now honors as St. Clothilde.

Clovis’ kingdom had been divided equally among his four sons following his death in 511. In an effort to secure Clodomir’s share of the territory after his death, two of Clodoald’s uncles plotted to kill the three boys who were under the protection of the queen. While the uncles managed to kill Gunthar and Theudovald, Clodoald fled and was taken in by the archbishop Saint Remigius of Rheims,

Forced into seclusion by the plot against him, the young man became determined to renounce the power and wealth that had brought grief to his family. Placing himself in God’s service, Clodoald lived in a small monastic cell where he pursued a life of asceticism and contemplative prayer. He gave his inheritance to the poor, and eventually became a disciple of the hermit St. Severinus near Paris.

No longer pursued by his uncles, Clodoald appeared before the bishop of Paris in 542. He formally received the monastic habit from the bishop, who cut off the long hair that had signified his Frankish royal origins. Clodoald eventually left Paris to live as a hermit in the forest for several years, growing closer to God in his contemplative vocation and studying Sacred Scripture extensively.

During these years, pilgrims began making their way to the hermitage, seeking his prayers which were known to work miracles. Though he had left Paris to live in anonymity and solitude, the hermit now sensed a need to return to the city, where he was ordained a priest in 551. His two murderous uncles are said to have repented of their deeds during the time of his ministry.

In 554 Clodoald returned to the monastic life, founding and leading a community of monks in the village of Nogent near Paris. There, he was known for his generosity toward the poor, and his attention to the work of religious instruction among the people. He died on Sept. 7, 560, at the age of 38.

Under the name of “St. Cloud,” Clodoald became the namesake of several cities and towns. These include the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud, and later St. Cloud, Minnesota, whose Catholic diocese has been placed under his patronage.