Episode Details

It's the Feast of St Peter Claver, 3rd Class, with the color of White. In this episode: the meditation: "A Salutary Meditation", today's news from the Church: "The Hymn of the Society of Saint Pius X", and today's thought from the Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Have feedback or questions about the DD or our other shows? podcast@sspx.org

Sources Used Today:

• "A Salutary Meditation" — From the Assumption to Advent
  • https://angeluspress.org/products/from-trinity-sunday-to-the-assumption
  
  
• "The Hymn of the Society of Saint Pius X" (FSSPX.news)
  • https://fsspx.news/en/news/hymn-society-saint-pius-x-60879
  
  
• The Spiritual Life — Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (Angelus Press)
  • https://angeluspress.org/products/spiritual-life-archbishop
  
  

Please support our new project, the Archbishop Lefebvre Biography Audiobook:

• Learn more:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Wp4MQdK2o
• Donate:https://sspx.gifts/audiobook

Saint Peter Claver spent nearly forty years meeting ships that most people in seventeenth-century Cartagena wanted nothing to do with.

He was born in Spain in 1580 and entered the Jesuits as a young man. While studying on the island of Majorca, he met an elderly Jesuit brother, Saint Alphonsus Rodríguez, who became convinced that Peter's vocation was waiting for him across the Atlantic.

So Peter went to Colombia.

Cartagena was one of the great ports of the Spanish Empire, and tragically, one of the principal entry points for enslaved Africans brought to South America. Ships arrived carrying hundreds of people who had endured weeks below deck in horrific conditions. Many were sick. Some were dying. Few spoke Spanish.

Peter decided this would be his parish.

Whenever word came that a slave ship was approaching, he headed for the docks carrying whatever he could gather: water, fruit, bread, medicine, clothing, tobacco, and interpreters who spoke African languages.

Then he went below deck.

The conditions were awful. Heat, disease, filth, and fear filled the holds. Peter crawled into those spaces anyway, tending wounds and reassuring people who had no idea where they were or what was going to happen next.

He called himself "Petrus Claver, Aethiopum servus," Peter Claver, slave of the Africans.

And he meant it.

Peter understood that preaching Chr