Roque González de Santa Cruz

Life and Ministry

Roque González was born at Asunción in AD 1576, the son of a Spanish colonial family that had crossed to Paraguay a generation earlier. Ordained a secular priest in AD 1598 and made canon of Asunción cathedral, he refused both the canonry and the offer of the see and instead entered the Society of Jesus in AD 1609. Sent into the upper Paraná as a missionary to the Guaraní, he learned the language fluently, traveled by canoe through country no Spanish soldier had penetrated, and was the principal founder of the famous Jesuit reductions — self-governing Christian villages of Guaraní families that would, in the next century, become a celebrated experiment in indigenous Catholic community. González founded San Ignacio Guazú in AD 1610, Concepción in AD 1620, and Caaró in AD 1628, baptized thousands of Guaraní by his own hand, and translated catechism and prayers into the Guaraní tongue.

Circumstances of Death

On 15 November AD 1628, in the new reduction of Caaró, the local Guaraní shaman Ñezú — who saw the reductions as a threat to his religious authority — directed a group of warriors to attack González while he was hanging a bell in the unfinished chapel. He was struck from behind with a stone axe and killed on the spot; his companion Alonso Rodríguez Olmedo was killed the same afternoon as he came out of the priest's house to investigate the disturbance. Ñezú's men then set fire to the chapel with González's body inside, intending to obliterate the evidence; the fire consumed the building but failed to consume his heart, which was recovered the next day and is preserved at Asunción. (Some modern accounts have rightly noted the political layer in such episodes — the Guaraní were resisting Spanish colonial encroachment as well as a new religion — but the Jesuit reductions were emphatically not military and González was unarmed.)

Legacy

González is the founder-saint of the Paraguay reductions and the first martyr of the Río de la Plata. Canonized by John Paul II in AD 1988 with his two companions, he is remembered as the missionary who learned the language before he preached the sermon and who died at the bell of an unfinished chapel. His witness is that the gospel is carried first on the lips of those who have learned to listen — that Christ is preached in the tongue of the hearer, not the conqueror, and that the chapel built by hands which know the country is the chapel for which the country will receive the Lord. His preserved heart at Asunción is a relic of a missionary who gave his whole self to a people not his own.