Alberto Hurtado

Luis Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga was born in 1901 in Viña del Mar, on the central coast of Chile. His father died when Alberto was still a young child, leaving his mother, Ana Cruchaga, to raise two sons in reduced circumstances. The family sold property and moved repeatedly among relatives. Despite this instability, Hurtado obtained a scholarship to the Jesuit Colegio San Ignacio in Santiago, where he was a strong student and a member of the Sodality of Our Lady. He then studied law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, supporting himself in part by tutoring, and completed his degree in the early 1920s. Already during his university years he had resolved to enter the Society of Jesus, which he did in 1923.

After novitiate and juniorate in Chile he continued Jesuit formation in Argentina and Spain. The expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1932 led to his transfer to Belgium. He was ordained a priest in Louvain in 1933 and completed a doctorate in pedagogy and psychology at the Catholic University of Louvain. In Europe he absorbed contemporary Catholic social thought and pastoral methods. Returning to Chile in 1936, he taught religion at Colegio San Ignacio and pedagogy at the Catholic University, served as chaplain to Catholic university students, and became a leading figure in Chilean Catholic Action, especially among the young. He was known as an energetic preacher, retreat director, and spiritual guide.

His social apostolate was shaped by papal social encyclicals and by his own early experience of poverty. In 1941 he published ¿Es Chile un país católico?, arguing that Chilean Catholicism was often merely nominal and that the Church had failed to evangelize the working class adequately; the book provoked controversy. In 1944, after helping a sick homeless man who had nowhere to go, he founded Hogar de Cristo (Home of Christ), first as a night shelter and soon as a nationwide network of homes, hospices, and programs for the homeless, abandoned children, and the dying. He traveled Chile raising funds, often in a well-known green truck. In 1947 he founded the Asociación Sindical Chilena to promote Christian trade unionism and Catholic social teaching in labor relations.

In his last years he continued to write on the social apostolate, labor, and lay spirituality while directing the expanding Hogar de Cristo. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he died in Santiago in 1952 at the age of fifty-one. He was first buried in the chapel of Hogar de Cristo; his remains were later transferred to the Sanctuary of Saint Alberto Hurtado in Santiago. Popular devotion grew quickly. Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1994 and Pope Benedict XVI canonized him in 2005. The Church keeps his feast on 18 August. He is invoked as a patron of Chile, of the poor, of street children, and of social workers, and Hogar de Cristo remains one of Chile’s principal charitable institutions.