Saint Peter Claver

Peter Claver grew up in Catalonia, Spain, studied with the Jesuits, and felt pulled toward the missions from early on. A Jesuit brother named Alphonsus Rodriguez told him, point blank, to go to the New World. Peter listened. He sailed to Cartagena (in modern-day Colombia) around 1610 and never went back.

Cartagena was one of the busiest slave ports in the Americas. Ships arrived packed with enslaved Africans who had survived brutal ocean crossings, many of them sick, starving, and terrified. Peter walked onto those ships before anyone else did. He brought food, medicine, and people who could translate. He baptized hundreds of thousands over four decades. He called himself "the slave of the slaves forever."

This wasn't charity from a distance. He sat with people in the holds of ships. He cleaned wounds. He learned enough of several African languages to communicate, and he recruited interpreters so nothing got lost. He also visited prisons and hospitals, ministered to condemned criminals on their way to execution, and spent years hearing confessions in the port city.

His last four years were rough. He got sick and was largely confined to his room, sometimes neglected and forgotten by the people around him. He died on September 9, 1654, and the city that had mostly ignored his final years gave him a massive funeral.

Pope Leo XIII canonized him in 1888, the same year he canonized Alphonsus Rodriguez, the brother who had pointed him toward the Americas in the first place.