THE ROADS WE'VE TRAVELED -- Interview with Sister Peter Claver
What were your ambitions when you were young?
When I was eighteen my brother Albert took me with him to New York and introduced me to the city. He took me to the theatres, I saw the Follies. He left me there to live at the Davenclare, a place for young girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. I lived there until my mother came to live with me. I studied dancing under a Russian teacher. I joined the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. I remember being in the Opera of All Eda as a page, walking across the stage with a large tray of tropical fruit while was Carusho was singing in his magnificent tenor voice. My brother Charles returned from World War I. He visited the studio and when he went back to the apartment he told my mother to take me out of that ballet. He didn't talk to me at all, he talked to my mother-- "Take her out and put her in college." And in the fall of that year, I entered Trinity College, a Catholic women's college. I entered the fall of 1919. I was quite a different person leaving college then when I entered it.
Describe the work that you have been involved in in your life.
This was a missionary service of the Most Blessed Trinity. They were women gathered for the spiritualization of the laity and to labor among the poor and the abandoned. I joined this group and have spent seventy-four years as a religious. Our ministry at that time was primarily among the Black segregated African American--the Diocese of Newark, New Jersey. I was invited to go to this home of a black women who had been in a white parish and she had organized a few black Catholics and they were meeting in her home. And they were trying to raise money in order to buy a house for the girls that came north, for their security. This was in 1929.
How have you been involved and witness to social reform and social justice in this country?
Our place was very small and it was in the slum area of Erie. There was a bar across the street. One night when we had a group for prayer and a priest walked in with a young girl about sixteen and he said that he was closing the church. One of the women said, "Sister, I'll take her home, I have young people." And another woman called me up on the phone, said that she had had a woman that attempted suicide and would I take her? I said, "No, I don't know what to do with a woman who attempted suicide, but she must have misunderstood me for in ten minutes the doorbell rang and she had the woman there. She said, "I took all of the tablets away from her." Well I found out the woman was tired. I told her, take a hot bath and get in bed. She slept all night and then all day the next day. I gave her a good meal, and she went home. And I said, "We need a place for women that are in crisis." You know, so we started--and uh, we found a house and they have a big, big place and they've changed the name to "Network" and they do marvelous work.
Another thing: the prison system has really failed in this country and there's a movement started called Restorative Justice which brings in the offender and the victim and the community. It is poor people that are incarcerated. Ninety percent in this area are black. Our work has been tutoring, helping these people to get their GED certificates. And I'll tell you a story about one prisoner. He was a young boy that had been on drugs. He and a seventeen year old boy--he was eighteen--mugged a woman. Mike, well Mike was very sullen, very hard kind of an individual. He was shifted from one person to another and the director put him beside me one day. And we were working, trying to get him to learn to read English. And he looked up to me and stopped one day and he said, "Sister, anybody can teach me to read," but he said, "tell me about God." So Mike has been incarcerated for about four or five years and now I have a stack of letters. He's never ceased writing. We've corresponded for four or five years.
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