More about Father Roque

Pictured here is the missionary on whose life the film The Mission was based. Pastor Allen use him as an example of a single person who was used greatly by God. Here is some more about his life:

Roque Gonzalez y de Santa-Cruz was the son of noble Spanish parents, and he came into this world at Asuncion, the capitol of Paraguay, in 1576. He was an unusually good and religious boy, and everybody took it for granted that young Roque would become a priest. He was in fact ordained, when he was twenty-three: but unwillingly, for he felt very strongly that he was unworthy of the priesthood. At once he began to take an interest in the Indians of Paraguay, seeking them out in remote places to preach to and instruct them in Christianity; and after ten years, to avoid ecclesiastical promotion and to get more opportunity for missionary work, he joined the Society of Jesus.

These were the days of the beginnings of the famous "reductions" of Paraguay, in the formation of which Father Roque Gonzalez played an important part. These remarkable institutions were settlements of Christian Indians run by the Jesuit missionaries, who looked on themselves, not like so many other Spaniards did as the conquerors and "bosses" of the Indians, but as the guardians and trustees of their welfare.

It was to bring about such a happy state of things that Father Roque labored for nearly twenty years, grappling patiently and without discouragement with hardships, dangers and reverses of all kinds, with intractable and fierce tribes and with the opposition of the European colonists. He threw himself heart and soul into the work. For three years he was in charge of the Reduction of St. Ignatius, the first of them, and then spent the rest of his life establishing others reductions, half a dozen in all, east of the Parana and Uruguay rivers; he was the first European known to have penetrated into some districts of South America.