St. Alberto Hurtado

Who they were

Alberto Hurtado was a Chilean Jesuit, a lawyer before the novitiate and a doctorate in education after, who found his life's question one winter night in Santiago in 1944: a sick man shivering in the rain, and Hurtado's sermon days later asking a comfortable congregation where Christ slept last night.

The collection that followed founded the Hogar de Cristo, the Home of Christ, and Hurtado spent his remaining eight years as its engine. He drove his famous green pickup through Santiago's nights personally gathering homeless children and men, built shelters and workshops and trade schools, wrote a book asking whether Chile was a Catholic country and scandalized the pious by answering with data, founded a Chilean trade union association to put Catholic social teaching into contracts, and launched a journal. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at fifty, he spent his dying months repeating the phrase Chile has kept as his signature: contento, Senor, contento. Content, Lord, content. The Hogar de Cristo today is one of Latin America's largest charities.

Why people turn to St. Alberto Hurtado

Everyone who serves the homeless, alongside St. Benedict Joseph Labre, who knew it from the inside, and Bl. Solanus Casey, who fed a city from a door. Union members and labour organizers have their modern patron. Social workers too.

How to ask their intercession

His night drive question: who, specifically, is outside tonight within a mile of you. And contento, Senor is about the shortest honest prayer there is for a terminal diagnosis.