Alberto Hurtado
Drove Santiago's streets at night in a green truck picking up the homeless, and died of cancer at 51
Alberto Hurtado was born in Viña del Mar in 1901. His father died when he was four and the family lost its land, so he grew up dependent on relatives, a scholarship boy at the Jesuit college in Santiago who spent his Sunday afternoons in the poorest districts of the city. He qualified as a lawyer, put off entering the Jesuits until his mother and brother were provided for, and was ordained in Belgium in 1933.
Back in Chile from 1936 he taught, wrote and became chaplain to the Catholic youth movement, where his energy and impatience with the comfortable made him admired and disliked in roughly equal measure. His book Is Chile a Catholic Country? annoyed the bishops by suggesting that the answer was no.
In October 1944, preaching at a retreat for society women, he spoke about a man he had met the night before, shivering and sick, with nowhere to go. The collection that followed became the Hogar de Cristo, the Home of Christ, which opened shelters for the homeless, first for men, then for children and women. Hurtado drove a green pickup through Santiago at night collecting people from doorways and bringing them in. He later founded a Christian trade union association in 1947 and, in 1951, the magazine Mensaje.
He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1952 and died in August, aged fifty-one, reportedly saying that he was content. The Hogar de Cristo is now one of the largest charities in Chile. He was canonised in 2005.