La construcción de la santidad: la Beata Laura Vicuña

Abstract

From the first hagiography in 1911 of Laura del Carmen Vicuña (Santiago de Chile, 1891- Junín de los Andes, 1904), began the process of building her sanctity. Her process was focused on the sacrificial dedication for the conversion of her mother. The Institute of Hijas de María Auxiliadora, began her Cause in the 1950s and was declared Blessed in 1988. In this work we will approach to the figure of Laura Vicuña from the concept of construction of sanctity and the controversy generated from the search for her photo to know her true face. From a large documentary corpus that includes her hagiographies and historical biographies, added to the testimonies collected among the persons who knew the girl, we will observe the exemplary construction of a virtuous young woman who serves as an example of spirituality to follow for girls pupils in the schools of the Institute of Hijas de María Auxiliadora. This construction of sanctity was seen through the search for Laura’s face, which until now was represented through Caffaro Rore’s painting, as a girl with a white, pale complexion and a languid look with loose, straight, dark hair. The appearance in 1990 of a group photo of the students of the Junín de los Andes school, in which the Salesian Ciro Brugna affirmed that Laura and her sister Julia would meet there, shows a completely different face from the pictures and representations of the Blessed until that moment. The controversy unleashed within the Hijas de María Auxiliadora, after the expert report of the Carabineros de Chile on Laura’s face, was constituted as a decisive factor in the construction of sanctity of the young blessed student of the Colegio María Auxiliadora de Junín de Los Andes (Argentina), on its way to the Altars