Memorial of Saint Peter Claver, Priest

 Lectionary: 436

You once were alienated and hostile in mind because of evil deeds;
God has now reconciled you
in the fleshly Body of Christ through his death...

As we celebrate the feast of Saint Peter Claver, the self-described "Slave of the slaves," we remember Saint Paul's characterizations of his converts' former way of life: they were "alienated and hostile in mind because of evil deeds." 

Different translations render the verse differently, but in this New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE), favored by the Catholic Church in the United States, the doers of "evil deeds" are not specified. Was it you who were once alienated and hostile in mind? Or was it those who did evil deeds to you? 

In my work at the VA I came to appreciate how people suffer moral injury by things they have done, by things done to them, and by evil deeds they have seen and could not prevent. Millions of African people were brought to the Caribbeans islands, and to North and South America as slaves. This was an unspeakable crime which left them and their descendants "alienated and hostile in mind." 

If some southern landowners in the United States, and many northern politicians supposed the Civil War eliminated slavery and cancelled alienation and hostility among the freed people, they were guilty of willful ignorance. By 1870, only a few years after the War, the Party of Lincoln had lost all interest in easing the plight of former slaves. (According to David Blight, in his biography of Frederick Douglass, the party's concern was to win votes and stay in power, not fairness and equality.) America has often been the land of quick fixes and easy solutions, of cancelling the past, and plunging recklessly toward a future of greater disparity.

Saint Peter Claver reminds us of our history of sin and of God' presence in our history. Even when the slave trade was at its greatest, when virtually every investor had stock in the industry, God was raising men and women to oppose it. When slavery was just as normal to the eighteenth century as the tobacco, pornography, and arms industries are to the 21st century, God mercy was reconciling slaves and slavers "in the fleshly Body of Christ through his death." 

Claver performed this miracle by baptizing thousands of Africans as they arrived in Cartagena, Columbia. His protest was never rude or destructive. He didn't pour blood on records or burn dollar bills in trading rooms. He administered what medicines he could find, spoke the language of kindness to men and women who feared he might sell them for food, buried those who had perished in transit, and offered religious instruction through trained interpreters. He hoped that those Spanish overlords who claimed to be Christian might show greater kindness to the newly baptized in the Spirit of Saint Paul's teaching. 

It would be many centuries before slavery would become illegal throughout most of the world. And so long as free market capitalism governs the world's economy, slavery will persist in its shadowy underground.

Today's feast and Pope Francis's Laudato Si remind us to continue proclaiming the dignity of all persons in the face of ruthless, wasteful exploitation.