Laura Vicuña

Laura del Carmen Vicuña Pino was born on 5 April 1891 in Santiago, Chile, the daughter of José Domingo Vicuña and Mercedes Pino. Her father’s family belonged to the Chilean elite, but the civil war of 1891 and the political upheavals that followed left the household in a precarious position. José Domingo Vicuña died while Laura was still a small child, and Mercedes, now a widow with two daughters—Laura and her younger sister Julia—crossed the Andes into Argentina in search of security and work. They settled in the Neuquén region of northern Patagonia, in and around the frontier town of Junín de los Andes. There Mercedes entered a relationship with a local landowner, Manuel Mora, who offered material support in return for cohabitation. The union was not regularized in the Church, and Mora was widely remembered as a violent man.

Despite these circumstances, Mercedes succeeded in placing both girls as boarding pupils with the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians (the Salesian Sisters) at their school in Junín de los Andes. Laura received a Christian education in the tradition of Saint John Bosco and Saint Mary Mazzarello. Contemporaries and the sisters later described her as obedient, prayerful, and especially devoted to the Eucharist and to the Virgin Mary. She made her First Communion at the school and was enrolled in the Children of Mary. She expressed a wish to become a Salesian sister, but her age and her mother’s irregular household were treated as obstacles, and she never entered the novitiate or took religious vows.

As she grew older, Laura became aware of the moral and spiritual situation of her mother and of the abuse present in Mora’s household. According to the testimony gathered for her cause, she offered her life to God for Mercedes’s conversion. Mora resented the girl’s resistance to his advances and her influence over her mother and subjected her to physical violence. Combined with a serious pulmonary illness, commonly identified as tuberculosis, the mistreatment destroyed her health. In late 1903 and January 1904 she grew rapidly weaker, sometimes cared for at the school and sometimes kept away from it. On her deathbed she is reported to have told her mother of the offering she had made. Mercedes thereafter left Mora and returned to the practice of the Catholic faith.

Laura Vicuña died on 22 January 1904 in Junín de los Andes, at the age of twelve. She was buried in that town; her remains have since been associated with the chapel of the Salesian Sisters there. A reputation for holiness spread among the Salesians and the local population of Chile and Argentina. Her cause was introduced in the twentieth century, and on 3 September 1988 Pope John Paul II beatified her in Saint Peter’s Square, presenting her to the Church as a model of youthful fidelity, purity, and sacrificial love, especially for young people facing family breakdown and abuse. She has not been canonized. Her liturgical commemoration is kept on 22 January. Devotion to her remains particularly strong in Chile and Argentina and within the Salesian Family, and she is invoked as a patron of victims of abuse and of those who suffer in difficult domestic circumstances.