To the Band of Brothers: November 17, 2020
Good morning!
Yesterday’s email necessarily had to be about cross-country. It’s not every day you can write to congratulate state champions (although with cross-country you come pretty close). Today’s email is about yesterday’s saint: Roque Gonzalez y de Santa Cruz.
I wanted to point him out because he will be one of ten Jesuit saints who will be highlighted in one of the ten side niches of the Our Lady of Belen Chapel. Five of them will be saints from Latin America, the other five from North America. Roque belongs to the former.
Born and raised in Asunción, Paraguay in 1576, he spoke perfect Spanish and Guarani. He entered the diocese where he was ordained a priest and then, a few years later, decided to become a Jesuit. What inspired him was his desire to be a missionary to the indigenous populations.
St. Roque is of particular interest because he was the founder of various Jesuit missions known as “reductions.” They were small or reduced societies the Jesuits created in order to protect the Guarani Indians from the Spanish and Portuguese slave trade. In them, the Jesuits taught the indigenous people various trades so they could be self-sustaining.
Unfortunately, the reductions didn’t last long because the Spanish and Portuguese crowns ordered them closed and burnt to the ground. I highly recommend one day you watch the movie “The Mission” starring Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons with your parents. It helps tell the story.
As for St. Roque, the story goes that one of the local medicine men felt threatened by the Jesuit missionaries and ordered them killed. While St. Roque was overseeing the installation of a large bell for the village chapel, he was tomahawked to death along with St. Juan del Castillo.
St. Roque died a brave martyr. To this day, his heart is preserved in one of the Jesuit churches in Asunción. Why keep the heart? Because it was the source of his love for Christ and the indigenous people of South America. It was the source of his great courage.
Auspice Maria,
Fr. Willie ‘87
BELEN JESUIT PREPARATORY SCHOOL
500 SW 127th Avenue, Miami, FL 33184
phone: 305.223.8600 | fax: 305.227.2565 | email: webmaster@belenjesuit.org
500 SW 127th Avenue, Miami, FL 33184
phone: 305.223.8600 | fax: 305.227.2565 | email: webmaster@belenjesuit.org
Belen Jesuit Preparatory School was founded in 1854 in Havana, Cuba by Queen Isabel II of Spain. The task of educating students was assigned to the priests and brothers of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), whose teaching tradition is synonymous with academic excellence and spiritual discipline. In 1961, the new political regime of Cuba confiscated the School property and expelled the Jesuit faculty. The School was re-established in Miami the same year, and over the next decade, continued to grow. Today, Belen Jesuit sits on a 30-acre site in western Dade County, only minutes away from downtown Miami.