Take a walk down the dusty grey streets behind Santiago's Central Station and somewhere in that urban hinterland you will come across an unexpected sight: the monumental tomb of a Jesuit priest whose death on 18th August 1952 changed Chile for good.

It's an odd compound, shrine cum social services centre and bustling inner city parish.  One morning back in 1996, an anxious man was waiting for the tall sanctuary gates to open.  The father of Viviana Marcela Galleguillos Fuentes, his situation was desperate.  Young Viviana was in a coma in Valparaíso with fatal brain damage and no hope.  He had left her bedside to travel to the capital on an off-chance, there to entrust her fate to the intercession of Chile's most celebrated pastor.  Within minutes of the gatekeeper's arrival the petition had been scribbled into a little book beside the tomb.

That lunchtime Viviana woke up, bearing no trace of what she had endured.  Blessed Alberto Hurtado had worked a second miracle, thereby setting in motion a train of events which culminated on Sunday 23 October in a Vatican canonisation.