Once again, through the generosity of a delightful aunt who left money in her will with the stipulation that I travel to places which I couldn’t otherwise see, I went off to Cartagena, Colombia, last month. My goal was to visit the tomb of the great Jesuit St. Peter Claver.

The Old City of Cartagena itself remains a jewel of colonial life, quaint and colorful, picturesque in every way. The ancient walls protected against pirates who would have robbed the riches of Spain’s port of entry to the New World. Its historic tragedy lies in the fact that it had also received royal authority to deal in the horror of slavery.

Peter Claver spent his entire life ministering and serving the needs of the most destitute of human beings, torn from their families in Africa by tribal leaders who sold them off as chattel, and made even more miserable by the conditions of their transatlantic passage. They arrived at Cartagena in the most squalid of situations, about 1,000 persons a month, to be sold into labor in the mines or “fincas” (plantations).

Peter and the seven teams which he organized to serve the enslaved, washed away the filth of travel, fed them, dressed their infected wounds and tried to explain in the simplest of words garnered from countless African dialects something of the Christian message. Through almost 40 years Peter baptized some 300,000 people into the body of Christ. He loved them for the spark of divinity which made each person infinitely valuable.

Because the tragic institution of human slavery was so engrained in that entire society, young Peter chose to serve the needy with all his heart. Rather than confronting the dealers and owners, he campaigned for kindness and compassion, hoping to better the lives of all by his method.

In fact, as I thought about it, I realized that Peter Claver simply adopted the method of St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, namely returning Onesimus, a runaway slave who had been baptized, with the simple admonition to treat him as a new brother in Christ.

Curiously, the Bible seems to be totally ignorant of any social differentiation based on color as such. Because races were represented at every social level in those days, Mediterranean societies were completely indifferent to the issue of race.

Peter Claver went out to visit the new residences of those enslaved people, insisting on living in the barracks rather than in the haciendas of their masters.

The purpose of my retreat was to ponder the reality of racism in our society, even after all these years. In my backpack was a resource suggested by our archdiocesan office for African American ministry, namely the work by Fr. Clarence Williams of the Archdiocese of Detroit entitled “Recovery from Everyday Racisms.” It, together with the New Testament, was a powerful and unsettling guide for my retreat.

Over the years I had learned that members of our own Catholic African American community in Milwaukee still have some bitter memories of mistreatment and racial prejudice. People still living today remember being requested to attend Mass from the choir loft rather than mingle with worshippers in the pews below!

I have heard the stories of mothers who had been refused absolution for not sending their children to a Catholic school only to be told that the parish would not register Negro children for that same school! The grand folks in Milwaukee who are members of the Knights and Ladies of St. Peter Claver today belong to an organization founded precisely because the Catholic Knights of Columbus (themselves the objects of discrimination by other fraternal societies) refused to admit “Colored People.” The stories are tragic and true.

In the course of my six daily visits to Saint Peter Claver’s tomb, I gradually began to understand how infected we are as Americans by the constant presumption of unearned privilege by whites in our society. That attitude came with the pilgrim Puritans and found expression both in the way Native Americans were ruthlessly removed from the more desirable lands of our new nation, and in the ways that enslaved people from Africa were treated for centuries.

Only last month did the California legislature offer a formal apology for the tragic federal action in the early 1930s which rounded up thousands of Hispanics, American citizens and legal residents alike, and simply deported them to Mexico by train to make jobs for other Americans at the beginning of the Great Depression. This even included, historians tell us, people born in America who didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

Williams insists that the attitude of racism is deep and that it affects everyone, black and white alike, even those who abhor the mindset and consciously reject its premises. He claims, and indeed with overwhelming evidence from extensive research, that this is the fundamental American social disease, a deep addiction of the spirit, and perhaps our original sin.

Peter Claver taught me many things as I sat in the pew nearest his crystal tomb under the high altar of the parish church. Today the prejudices of that society may be against the indigenous Indian natives and their cultures rather than against people of color. The streets of Cartagena today are awash with faces of every color from the richest shining black to the mocha smiles. Maybe Peter’s love for the enslaved Africans really made a difference in that society. Perhaps that’s the only reality which might save us too.