Alonso Rodríguez Olmedo

Life and Ministry

Alonso Rodríguez Olmedo was born at Zamora in Castile in AD 1598, entered the Society of Jesus at Villagarcía de Campos at the age of sixteen, and was sent to the New World as a young scholastic before completing his theology. He arrived at Buenos Aires in AD 1617, was ordained at Córdoba in the Argentine interior in AD 1624, and was assigned the following year to the Paraguay missions under Roque González, whose Guaraní he had begun to learn as a student. He was thirty years old at the time of his death and had been a priest for less than four years. The brief surviving correspondence shows a man of joyful temper, devoted to González, and committed to the catechetical instruction of the Guaraní children at the reductions of Concepción and (in his final months) Caaró.

Circumstances of Death

Rodríguez was preparing the noon meal in the priest's house at Caaró on 15 November AD 1628 when he heard the commotion outside as the Guaraní warriors of the shaman Ñezú attacked González in the chapel. He stepped out to see what had happened and was struck down at the door of the priest's house with the same stone axes that had killed his superior. The two bodies were dragged into the chapel, which was then set on fire. (As with González, the killing had a political dimension — Ñezú's authority was threatened by the new Christian order of the reductions — but Rodríguez was an unarmed young priest who had been at Caaró less than two months and had taken no part in any dispute with the local population.) His body, like González's, was largely consumed by the fire that destroyed the chapel.

Legacy

Rodríguez is venerated as the second of the three martyrs of the Río de la Plata, canonized together with González and Juan del Castillo by John Paul II in AD 1988. He is the patron of young missionaries in South America — the man who died not at the height of a long apostolate but in the first months of one, before he had time to build anything of his own. His witness is the witness of the brief life given fully: Christ is served as wholly by the priest of four years at a doorway as by the founder of three reductions at a chapel bell, and the same fire took them both. The reduction of Caaró bore his blood and was named again, after the canonization, in his memory.