Saint Peter Claver
Patron of enslaved peoples, racial justice, Colombia
Feast day: September 9
Saint Peter Claver (1580-1654), a Spanish Jesuit at Cartagena, devoted forty years to the bodily and spiritual care of the enslaved Africans arriving in the New World, baptizing some three hundred thousand. Canonized in 1888, he called himself 'the slave of the slaves.'
