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Reflection on Today’s Feast

By Fr. Leo J. O'Donovan, SJ

Although admired by many religious viewers and indeed the winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1986, Roland Joffe's "The Mission," was a commercial flop.  It had highly bankable stars--Robert DeNiro and Jerry Irons; a screenplay by Robert Bolt who had become famous a quarter century earlier with "A Man For All Seasons;" and a memorable, melodious score by Ennio Morricone.  But it couldn't find an audience.

 Perhaps it suffered from the over-dramatization of being set in the 1750s, at the time of the Treaty of Madrid, instead of in the early 1600s, during the remarkable but perhaps more workaday missionary activity of Fr. Roch Gonzalez, S.J. (1576-1628) and his two younger Jesuit fellow missionaries Fr. Alphonsus Rodriguez (1598-1628) and Fr. John del Castillo (1596-1628).  (It was Fr. C. J. McNaspy's telling of their story that inspired Bolt's screenplay.)

 Roch (or Roque: a feminine name in most countries but masculine in Hispanic ones) was born in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, in 1576.  Ordained a priest in 1599 he entered the Jesuits in 1609 to avoid becoming his bishop's vicar general.  Living in the region of the Guaycuru, he was sent to them as a novice, to christianize and also civilize the Indians (so that the Spaniards could more easily reach Peru).  He learned the Guarani language and taught his new flock to plow, sow, tend the land and harvest crops.  Two years later he moved to the reduction of St. Ignatius, where he designed the public square,  housing for the Indians, a school and a church.  Mastering farming and raising cattle as well, he learned that the Guarani responded eagerly to drama and music and so he developed that too.

 From 1615 to 1627 Fr. Gonzalez served a series of reductions in southern Brazil and and northeast Argentina. When he moved to Uruguay in 1619 he left a younger Jesuit, Fr. John del Castillo (1596--1628), in charge of the Assumption reduction.  Fr. del Castillo, born in Spain, had traveled to South America as a missionary and was ordained a priest in 1625.  His ministry was to be brief: the local witch doctor, Nezu, resented his influence and had him murdered on Nov. 17, 1628.  His compatriot, Fr. Alphonsus Rodriguez (1598-1628), born also in Spain and ordained in 1624, had been working with Roch Gonzalez at the All Saints settlement.  There, two days before they too had been killed by accomplices of Nezu.

 It is not hard to see why Pope John Paul II canonized these three Jesuit brothers of ours on May 16, 1988.  They were indeed, as St. Paul wrote to the Philippians, "like lights in the world...[holding] on to the word of life" and ready, like Paul, in faithfulness to their mission to be "poured out as a libation upon the sacrificial service of [their] faith" (Phil 2.17-18). Indeed, they were subject through the malignity of Nezu and his kind to be persecuted as the Lord himself was in pseudo-worship of false gods of power and dominion (Jn 15.18-21; 16:1-3)

 And the story does not end there.  For yet again, on November 16, 1989, six other Jesuits were not so much murdered as slaughtered--if you have seen the pictures, you will remember their horror--because they had committed their lives to the lives of the poor around them, while reigning powers felt the threat of the simplicity and power of their Gospel.

 The names deserve to be called out: Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, Amando Lopez Quintana, Juan Ramon Moreno.  And: their housekeeper Elba Julia Ramos and her 15-year-old daughter.

 The names deserve to be called out.  And honored.  And to be lived among us as emblems of self-giving, sacrificial, glorious love--together with Roch Gonzalez, Alphonsus Rodriquez, and John del Castillo--all members of our least Society that bears the saving name of Jesus.

Fr. Leo O’Donovan, SJ, is the former president of Georgetown University and the director of mission for Jesuit Refugee Services USA. He is a native New Yorker.

Previous Reflections

November 16, 2021 – By Fr. John Swope, SJ

On November 16th, the Catholic Church celebrates the lives of the South American-born Jesuit Martyr, Fr. Roque González de Santa Cruz (1576-1628), and his Spanish-born Jesuit brothers, Juan del Castillo and Alonso Rodríguez y Olmedo. St. Roque was a great missionary to the Guaraní people in the region known as the “Triple Border,” where Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet along the Paraná River.  These martyrs were canonized in Paraguay on May 16, 1988, by St. John Paul II.

Fr. Roque was born in Asuncion, in what is now Paraguay, in 1576, ordained as a diocesan priest in 1598, and only later in 1609 became a Jesuit.  CJ McNaspy, SJ, reminds us that St. Roque joined the Jesuits to avoid ecclesiastical promotion and so that he could wholeheartedly dedicate himself to the evangelization of and care for the Guaraní Indians. Bishop Angel Acha of Asuncion said of St. Roque’s Jesuit vocation, “There is no doubt that such an option and vocation in favor of the poor would be much better carried by living at the side of those totally dedicated to the poor: the missionaries, and especially the Jesuits.”

Son of one of the original conquistadors, Fr. Roque dedicated his intense life to the founding of the famed “Missions" – settlements, havens for the Guaraní against enslavement by the colonists. Over 20 years – his entire Jesuit priestly life – Fr. Roque served in seven different Missions, six of which he founded.

In 1628, Fr. Roque was joined by two young Spanish Jesuits, Alonso (Alphonsus) Rodríguez and Juan de Castillo, and together they founded a new Mission, dedicated in honor of Our Lady's Assumption. Father Castillo was left in charge there, while the other two pushed on to Caaró (in the southern tip of what is now Brazil), where they established the All Saints' Mission.  Here they were faced with the hostility of a powerful "medicine man," and at his instigation the Mission was soon attacked.

Fr. Roque was getting ready to hang a small church bell when the raiding party arrived; one man stole up from behind and killed him with blows on the head from a tomahawk. Fr. Rodríguez heard the noise and, coming to the door of his hut to see what it was about, met the bloodstained attackers who knocked him down. "What are you doing, my sons?" he exclaimed. But he was silenced by further blows. The wooden chapel was set on fire and the two bodies thrown into the flames. It was November 15, 1628. Two days later the Mission at Ijuhi was attacked; Father Castillo was seized and bound, barbarously beaten, and stoned to death.

The irony of the martyrdom of Fr. Roque and his companions is that those who executed them were unaware that they were killing their most stalwart defenders. Today, descendants of the Guaraní Indians regard Fr. Roque as their hero.  What makes St. Roque’s defense of the Indians exceptional is the fact that he was a native-born Paraguayan and had to struggle against his own kinsmen, even members of his family, in defense of the dignity and the rights of the Guaraní.

St. Roque’s commitment to struggle against the exploitation of the Guaraní did not come out of thin air. In the early 16th century, Bartolomé de las Casas advocated is Spain for the freedom of indigenous people, joined the Dominican order and became the Bishop of San Cristobal in Southern Mexico in 1545. He established communities of free indigenous people nearly a century before the work of Fr. Roque González, SJ. In the same period, a movement in defense of Indians was led by a group of Dominican bishops. Enrique Dussel, a contemporary Argentine theologian calls them, “Latin American Fathers of the Church.”  One can think of these courageous Church leaders as precursors of St. Roque.

Twenty-five years ago, I had the opportunity to visit San Ignacio Guazú in Paraguay, site of the Mission that Fr. Roque developed beginning in 1610. The ruins remain and in the Diocesan Museum of Jesuit Art, one can appreciate the grand design of the Mission.  As the shadows lengthened on the afternoon I visited the Mission, I remember a fear that came over me as I imagined the daily life Fr. Roque far from Asuncion, surrounded by a people not his own and keenly aware vague threats from some Guaraní leaders and colonists who opposed the Mission.  As I passed through the ruins for the last time, I paused at a stand that was selling all sorts of devotional items.  I bought this little santuario that has small statues of St. Roque and St. Ignatius.  I’ve had it with me ever since.  They stand in my office - side by side. St. Roque indeed carried out the great vision of St. Ignatius as a Jesuit “far flung into the world” for the greater glory of God.