St. Alberto Hurtado

Saint Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga was born on January 22, 1901, in Viña del Mar, Chile, into a family that was financially comfortable but marked by early loss. His father, a Chilean lawyer and politician, died when Alberto was still a child, and the family's fortunes declined sharply in the years that followed. As a young man he worked as a tutor and laborer to support himself and his mother, an experience that exposed him directly to the hardships of working-class life in early twentieth-century Chile. These formative years of poverty and dependence on others, rather than the comfortable middle-class world of his birth, would shape the direction of his entire priestly ministry. Hurtado entered the Chilean novitiate of the Society of Jesus in 1923 and was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1933, after studies in Chile, Spain, and Belgium. He later completed a doctorate in education and psychology in Louvain, returning to Chile in 1936 to take up a position as a teacher and chaplain. He quickly became known as a passionate and articulate voice for the marginalized, writing books and articles on social questions, labor conditions, and Catholic social teaching, and serving as a national leader of the Jesuit sodality movement that trained young Catholic professionals in the social apostolate. In 1944, after reading an account of the Children's Villages movement in postwar Europe, Hurtado founded Hogar de Cristo, a shelter and home for the street children he encountered in Santiago. Within a short time he was personally driving a green pickup truck through the city to bring homeless children to safety, and the nickname 'el padre de la camioneta verde,' the priest of the green truck, stuck with him for the rest of his life. Hogar de Cristo grew into a nationwide network of homes, schools, and community programs serving not only children but also the elderly, the disabled, and the chronically ill. Hurtado also founded El Mensaje, a Catholic social magazine, and worked to unionize workers, promote housing reform, and lobby for labor legislation during a period of intense social change in Chile. Hurtado's final years were marked by painful illness. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died on August 18, 1952, in Santiago, at the age of 51. Almost immediately there was widespread popular devotion to him, and he was declared Venerable in 1990, beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1994, and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. He is remembered in Chile as one of the country's most significant twentieth-century figures, and Hogar de Cristo continues to operate shelters and social programs across the country. He is the patron saint of social workers, poor children, and Chile, and his feast day is celebrated on August 18.