Antonio Ruiz de Montoya

Antonio Ruiz de Montoya was born in Lima, Peru, on 13 June 1585 and died there on 11 April 1652. He was a Jesuit priest and missionary in the Paraguayan Reductions.

Montoya entered the Society of Jesus on 1 November 1606. In the same year, he accompanied Father Diego Torres, the first provincial of Paraguay, to this mission.

In co-operation with Fathers Cataldino and Mazeta, he founded the Reductions of Guayra. He also brought a number of tribal groups into the Catholic Church, and is said to have personally baptized 100,000 Indians. As head of the missions from 1620 he had charge of the "Reductions" on the upper and middle course of the Paraná River, on the Uruguay River, and the Tape River, and added thirteen further "reductions" to the twenty-six already existing.

When the missions of Guayra were endangered by the incursions of Paulistas from Brazil in search of slaves, Father Mazeta and Montoya resolved to move the Christian Indians, about 15,000 in number, to the reductions in Paraguay, partly by water with the aid of seven hundred rafts and numberless canoes, and partly by land through the forest. The plan was successfully carried out in 1631. "This expedition", says von Ihering, "is one of the most extraordinary undertakings of this kind known in history" [Globus, LX (1891), 179].

In 1637 Montoya (on behalf of the governor, the Bishop of Paraguay, and the heads of the orders) laid a complaint before Philip IV of Spain as to the Portuguese policy of sending kidnapping expeditions into the neighboring regions. He obtained from the king important exemptions, privileges, and protective measures for the reductions of Paraguay. Soon after his return to America, Montoya died.

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