Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament

September 9, 2026

Memorial of Saint Peter Claver, Priest

Today’s Gospel is the opening passage of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. In the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus states the Golden Rule but immediately moves beyond its reciprocal love to emphasize extravagant, radical love, doing as God would do. What could be more extravagant than loving your enemies and all the other commands Jesus issues in this sermon?

Love is not an emotion here but an action, exemplified in the life’s work of Peter Claver, a seventeenth-century Jesuit from Barcelona, who spent most of his life on the Jesuit mission in South America. He and his companions ministered to the thousands of enslaved Africans shipped into Cartagena, Colombia, each year.  It is estimated that 10,000 black Africans survived the brutal voyage across the Atlantic each year to spend their lives in slavery. Probably 5,000 more died every year on the voyage.

For almost 40 years, Claver practiced the radical love Jesus calls for in the Sermon on the Plain. The enslaved people arrived in South America stark naked, many of them seriously ill. In a letter to his superiors, Claver describes how he and his companions rushed to the port every time a ship landed, bringing food, drink, and healing remedies to the enslaved people. They tried to get the most seriously ill, some looking close to death, close to the fires they would build. He reports how men who seemed half-dead “seemed to recover their warmth and the breath of life. The joy in their eyes as they looked at us was something to see. .. we spoke to them, not with words but with our hands and our actions.”

What opportunities do we have to love in the radical way that Jesus and Peter Claver practiced? All of us have opportunities every day to love selflessly, willing only the good of the other. May we respond to the opportunities today.

Let Us Pray:

O God, who made Saint Peter Claver a slave of slaves and strengthened him with wonderful charity and patience as he came to their help, grant, through his intercession, that, seeking the things of Jesus Christ, we may love our neighbor in deeds and in truth. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. (Opening Prayer of Memorial of Saint Peter Claver)