Feast Day: August 18th
This week, having ran up the word count and not finished the story last time, we return to the young priest, Fr. Alberto Hurtado, as he began his ministry to the young and poor in Santiago Chile in the 1930s. It is important to note that he didn’t try to do all the Lord had put on his heart alone. He could have just ran back and forth from class, to the streets, to spiritual direction, and crash into bed having emptied himself in all of it. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not how Jesus did the Father’s will. Jesus called others around him, into friendship with Him, and from there into the mission given to Him by God the Father. So also the first disciples, sent out two by two, and by most saints since. And so also, Padre Hurtado who in the late 1930s began to collect his pupils around him.
Some he went deep, offering spiritual direction and directing retreats for groups of the boys. As it was for Alberto in his younger days, so also for these men it was a profound gift. They learned to pray, to discern, to strive for heroic sanctity. Some would go on to be priests, others good Christian fathers and leaders in their communities. The seeds planted by a priest willing to really befriend them would impact the world for the better for decades to come. But Padre Hurtado didn’t just engage them one-by-one or in small groups, he also enlisted whole cohorts of them into another Sodality of Our Lady. He taught them the catechism, and taught them how to teach the catechism to those stuck on the streets. So it was that his two loves – for the poor, and the young – was combined and multiplied as all of them grew in wisdom and grace.
And those studies and intelligence that he had been given he was about to unleash in a much bigger way in his pursuit to love the least brothers and sisters of Christ. In 1936, he wrote “The Priesthood Crisis in Chile”, depicting starkly the many little (and poor) towns who had no priest to bring them the sacraments. He also pointed to the dismal lack of formation for catechists, with many men enlisting to teach the faith but few of them receiving the formation they would need for that (much less to discern becoming a priest). For the leaders of the country (and the Church, the political party having a strong sway over the Church hierarchy) this was an unwelcome message. These were problems in the little places far from the important, prosperous, and politically impactful cities.
And Hurtado wasn’t done. In 1941, he published “Is Chile a Catholic Country?” For a country that was 94% Catholic, his answer – “not yet” – was shocking. But he pointed to the poor on every street and asked the provocative question: If people are starving, hurting, and abandoned, can we really say we are Christian? Or, similarly, if only 9% of women, and 3.5% of men, regularly attend Mass and receive Holy Communion, was Chile really Catholic?
In 1946 his most famous message was sent: he bought a green pickup truck. The backstory was that a year or two earlier he had encountered one of his beggars on a cold night, shivering on the streets, with no where to find shelter. A few days later he was leading a retreat for women when he spontaneously began talking about that man:
Christ roams through our streets in the person of so many of the suffering poor, sick and dispossessed, and people thrown out of their miserable slums; Christ huddled under bridges, in the person of so many children who lack someone to call father, who have been deprived for many years without a mother’s kiss on their foreheads . . . Christ is without a home! Shouldn’t we want to give him one, those of us who have the joy of a comfortable home, plenty of good food, the means to educate and assure the future of our children? “What you do to the least of me, you do to me,” Jesus said.
Soon after, with those women’s generosity, the first Hogar de Cristo (Home of Christ) was begun. It was modeled after Fr. Flanagan’s Boys Town in Nebraska, though over time he would open ones for children, then women, and then men. Some were trade schools, some rehabilitation centers, all of them offering shelter and food, but the deeper nourishment of mind and soul as well. Over the next 6 years 850,000 children alone received help as the homes opened across the country.
As for the truck, as he drove it around picking up the suffering and impoverished, it became an emblem of this crazy wonderful priest, and the crazy wonderful life that Christ means to bring to everyone through His Church.
In 1952 he was stricken with intense pain and diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In every newspaper and in broadcast media the entire country watched his decline. Throughout it all, having been faithful to the Lord in so many ways, the priest only said “I am content Lord.”
– Fr. Dominic is inspired this week to risk bigger things for Jesus. What could happen if we all simply did God’s will each day? What would happen if we lived our lives like a saint? What if our vehicle was known across the country as an emblem of Christ?