Laura Montoya y Upegui was born on 26 May 1874 in Jericó, in the department of Antioquia, Colombia, to Juan de la Cruz Montoya and Dolores Upegui, a modest and fervently Christian family. She was the second of three children and was baptized the same day. When she was about three years old, during the Colombian civil conflict of 1876, her father was killed by political opponents while defending homeland and faith. The household was left poor; unable to care for all her children, her mother entrusted little Laura to her maternal grandparents at the estate "La Vívora" near Amalfi.
With her grandparents she received a strong human and religious formation, memorizing the catechism, and in July 1881, at the age of seven, she made her First Communion. She later lived for a time under the care of a maternal aunt who managed an orphanage, and she learned to read and write largely on her own before formal schooling. She completed primary studies in various villages where her mother taught, then settled in Medellín to attend the normal school for teachers. After graduating as a teacher in 1893, she directed the Higher School for Young Ladies in Amalfi and taught in Fredonia, Santo Domingo, and, from 1909, at the College of the Immaculate in Medellín.
From childhood she felt a call to religious and missionary life and longed to become a Discalced Carmelite; at the same time she was pierced by the neglect of Colombia's Indigenous peoples and the lack of anyone to bring them the Gospel. Her vocation thus swung between enclosure and the forest. In 1907, at the age of thirty-three, while teaching in Marinilla, she experienced with special intensity the mystery of God's Fatherhood. She later testified that she saw herself enveloped in that paternity and made mother of the unfaithful in the most intense way, as if children she did not yet know were being formed in her; from then on she called them "my wound." This grace fixed her desire for spiritual motherhood and for the evangelization of those living without Christian faith, especially the Indigenous of vast Colombian regions.
In 1908 she made her first apostolic journey to the Guapá–Chamí region with two companions and a priest. The happy outcome included the collective baptism of seventy-two Embera-Chamí Indigenous people and her firm decision to dedicate her life to the missions. Returning to Medellín, she organized further missionary journeys with her mother and companions in what she called the "Work of the Indians." Advised by ecclesiastical superiors to give the work a stable foundation, she began the Congregation of the Missionaries of Mary Immaculate and Saint Catherine of Siena. On 14 May 1914 she left Medellín with four other women for Dabeiba to live among the native peoples. The Institute received its first ecclesiastical approval in 1916. Laura of Saint Catherine of Siena made her first profession on 1 January 1917 and perpetual profession on 8 December 1924. She was elected first superior general and governed until 1929, then again from 1938 until her death.
Her motto was to become Indigenous with the Indigenous in order to win them all for Christ. Despite calumnies, hardships, and criticism even within Christian circles, she found strength in God and in the Blessed Virgin Mary, to whom she had wholly consecrated herself. While she still lived, more than a hundred houses were opened in Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela; hundreds of young women joined her. At her death her spiritual daughters numbered 467, spread in several countries. After nine years in a wheelchair and a long agony, she died in Medellín on 21 October 1949.
Fame of holiness led to informative processes in Medellín in 1963–64. The cause was introduced in 1976; she was declared Venerable for heroic virtue on 22 January 1991, beatified by Pope John Paul II on 25 April 2004, and canonized by Pope Francis on 12 May 2013, the first saint of Colombia.
May Saint Laura obtain for us a share in her missionary charity, and let us practice today the spiritual motherhood that seeks every neglected soul for Christ.
