Feast Day: August 18th
Alberto was only 4 years old, the year was 1905, when the news reached his mother, brother, and he that his father had died. The loss ransacked the life of the little boy. Not only was he now bereft his father, but soon the family’s home as well, and then even the stability of his mother. Alberto and his brother would spend their childhood going from one home to another, cared for as best his relatives could, but deep in his heart he didn’t really have a place, or family, to call home.
As a young man he was given a scholarship at the Jesuit College in Santiago, San Ignacio. It was a prestigious all-boys school in the capital of Chile, some would see it as a chance for the young man to escape poverty, but Alberto was not moved to flee the sufferings of his youth. He joined the Sodality of Our Lady and began volunteering at a parish and school in one of the poorest parts of Santiago. He would help in the office and library and every Sunday afternoon would visit the poor and destitute in the slums around the Parish of Our Lady of Andacollo (the parish named after a little statue of Our Lady discovered by an indigenous Chilean near the mines of Andacollo in the mid-1500s. Feast day: December 26th).
As Alberto continued his studies at the Law School at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile he continued to serve the poor every week while also discerning a vocation to the Jesuits. He had a deep desire for marriage, but an ever deeper yearning to care for many more than he could in a natural family. He had begun spiritual direction – a beautiful step to make when in a time of deep discernment – and received the counsel of his spiritual director to hold off on entering an order while still caring for his mother and brother. (He was at that time going to classes and trying to complete his studies in the mornings, and then work various jobs in the afternoons and evenings to provide for his family, and then giving his weekends to visit the poor and those abandoned on the streets!) So it was that this call from God, to give his life for those in need, continued to grow. His spiritual director during these years recalled about Alberto: “He was incapable of seeing pain, nor indeed any need without seeking a way to solve it.”
Then in 1922, obligatory military service threw a curveball into everything. At this point, it is important to ask ourselves how we would have acted under similar circumstances. I know for myself that when obstacles and delays crash into my plans, or hopes, or attempts to follow the Lord, I often succumb to frustration, anger, or at least discouragement. It is tempting to throw up our hands and just give up on the bigger dreams and call of love. We don’t know how Alberto handled all of this, but his perseverance through the hindrances that would rise up later in his life tells us at least that the Lord taught him an important lesson in perseverance in charity during these tough years.
In 1923 he earned his law degree and finally entered the Jesuit order. For some, a religious vocation means stability – think of Benedictines (who make a vow of stability to live their life in a particular monastery) or Carmelites, or Poor Clares and other cloistered orders who similarly dedicate themselves to a common life in a particular place. Jesuits are sort of the opposite of this. They commit their lives to live wherever their order, and above all wherever the Holy Father, sends them. Such was the share in Christ’s poverty that Alberto embraced again. But he also discovered in this a relentless joy that could come from no one except Jesus. “”Here you have me, finally a Jesuit,” he wrote to a close friend, “as happy and content as one can be on this earth!”
He completed his novitiate and was then sent for two years to Cordoba, Argentina studying humanities. Then it was off to Barcelona, Spain to study philosophy and theology, though in 1931 the Jesuits were suppressed in that country and so he had to move on to Louvain, Belgium. There he completed a doctorate in pedagogy and psychology in 1935 having been ordained a priest in 1933. Again, we pause at this point to ask where the heart of the newly ordained Padre Hurtado was after 12 years of ever more advanced studies, so many travels and extraordinary experiences? Well, the first thing he did when he got back to Chile was to begin teaching religion at San Ignacio, pedagogy at the Catholic University of Santiago, and – as it turns out, most important to him – teaching catechism to the poor. He still loved the young, and the poor, more than anything.
Fr. Dominic has also had his fair share of travels and studies in his own path to the priesthood. This is both a blessing, and a challenge, and Fr. Hurtado life reminds him to think back to the “first love” that carried him into seminary. Perhaps all of us this week could recall where our heart was at 18 or 20. What were our dreams then? How had the Lord fashioned our hearts back when we were young? Have we given up on that call or just let it wither as the years have gone by or allowed life’s blessings and burdens to stretch and grow our hearts?