Homily for the Memorial of Saint Peter Claver

Mass for Saint Andrew Breakfast

September 9, 2023
St. Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

Isaiah 58:6-11
Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4, 6
Matthew 25:31-40

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who suffered imprisonment in the unjust Soviet system, wrote in his book entitled The Gulag Archipelago, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.” That small bridgehead is our free will and our hope, but only if free will and hope are reborn, redeemed, and nurtured by prayer.

Our first reading from the prophet Isaiah and written after a period of fifty years in which the people of Israel had been enslaved and oppressed by another tribe of people illustrates this beautifully. Isaiah, faithful to his vocation as a prophet, reminds Israel that the Lord hopes to receive from them generosity showered upon the poor; just treatment of people different than them in place of revenge, because God has revealed to Israel in liberating them from oppression that He doesn’t exclusively belong to them—He is everybody’s God.

Saint Peter Claver was born in Spain and began life with a very shy disposition. One day, while he was praying, Peter Claver had a spiritual experience of being called by God, and at the encouragement of Saint Alfonso Rodriguez, he joined the Jesuits and received his mission to serve in Colombia where he was ordained a priest in 1615. The spiritual encounter with God that Peter intimately experienced affected his soul and enabled him to recognize God’s unconditional love for all people and the human dignity of all people created in God’s image and likeness, especially those who had been enslaved and treated as property. This love experienced by Peter Claver in his prayer brought forth an awareness and sensitivity to the attack on human dignity experienced by Africans who were victimized by being captured by other tribes of Africans and sold to the Spaniards and Portuguese who enslaved them—violently separating them from their homeland, their spouses, parents, and children. The prayer of Peter Claver enlightened him to see Christ truly present in them and so he made himself their slave. Peter Claver died on September 8, 1654, in Cartagena, after forty years of voluntary slavery to the slaves.

Peter Claver never lost his primary commitment to prayer as being at the heart of his discernment and indispensable for the discernment and execution of right action. In fact, the primary place of prayer was something that he brought to the slaves as he rushed into the lower decks of the slave ships and treated the slaves’ wounds and disease. While reviving them physically, Peter Claver would preach by word and action a primary catechism of Christ’s Gospel of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness and teach them very simply in their own language the Lord’s Prayer. Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that “The Lord’s Prayer is the most perfect of prayers…. In it, we ask, not only for all the things we can rightly desire, but also in the sequence that they should be desired. This prayer not only teaches us to ask for things, but also in what order we should desire them.” It is this prayer first taught by Jesus that leads to the healing of sin by uniting us with the heart of Christ and bringing us to forgive and to seek forgiveness. Prayer opens our hearts and minds to correction, forgiveness, and communion.

Pope Francis preached the following words in Cartagena, Columbia, at the Shrine of Saint Peter Claver in 2017, “Jesus asks us to pray together, so that our prayer, even with its personal nuances and various emphases, becomes symphonic and arises as one single cry. I am sure that today we pray together for the rescue of those who were wrong and not for their destruction, for justice and not revenge, for healing in truth and not for oblivion.”

We cannot settle for the position that racial discord is simply a matter of systemic sin; because if it were only a matter of systemic sin– there would be no hope for justice or redemption, and we could easily excuse ourselves from the Christian duties of penance, reconciliation, and restitution. Our hope is not in ourselves but in God Almighty, who loves us enough to offer to save us from ourselves and loves us so much that He invites us to join Him in His saving work just as He invited Peter Claver and his co-workers. The difficulty is not in some alien system, but rather in our own sinful actions and refusal to act because of our own refusal to pray and to listen to God. This refusal to pray forms a sinful indifference within our souls to God and to our brothers and sisters most in need. For as we hear from Jesus in today’s Gospel, when the Son of Man comes in glory accompanied by His angels, He will discriminate and He will judge not by skin color, not by politics or religion, not by language or culture, but by the actions and care of those who recognized and loved Him in others most in need from those who did not even bother to care.

The change that is required is not a change in society brought about by ideologies or violent acts of anarchy; the change required is not a perfect enforcement of our laws; the change required is my own conversion of heart and your own conversion of heart to see in each and every human person a mysterious dignity measured only by the image and likeness of God.

This shared mission entrusted to us by God requires on each of our parts a renewed gratitude and celebration of our common humanity; a humanity that can be expressed by us but not mastered by us, a humanity that is not exploited by us, nor perverted of its meaning by us. As Pope Francis spoke on that occasion in 2017 in Cartagena, “In short, the demand is to build peace, as Peter Claver said while ‘speaking not with the tongue but with hands and works,’ and to lift up our eyes to heaven together. The Lord is able to untangle that which seems impossible to us; He has promised to accompany us to the end of time and will not allow our efforts to come to nothing.”