For years,
one of our Benedictine Oblates has traveled to Honduras with a mission
group to minister to the poor in remote areas of that country. Due to the political situation, which has
dragged on for many years, the trip can be dangerous and often soldiers have to
escort the group. Sometimes they
encounter revoltutionaries, yet all they have to do is mention the name of one nun
and they have free passage.
Lorene Ivanca has on several occasions worked with this
holy nun and always had great stories of the encounters in her native land and
the many children she was helping.
Having only died last year, she is already being considered for
canonization.
"I began
going to Honduras
in about 2002-2003. I have been going every year, except for the COVID
pandemic. (Missed 3 years?)
We work
with Sister Maria Rosa and SAN. We help out with building projects, working
with the children in the orphanages, water projects in the villages, and
medical brigades out in the remote areas.
Teams come
from St. Charles Borromeo in Tacoma (medical brigades)
and St. Stephens Parish in Renton,
teams from Cleveland (Water Brigade).
We take
doctors, nurses, lab technician, and worker bees with us to San Pedro Azulu. We
go out to five different villages, one per day, during the week that we are
there for the medical brigades. We have been trying to go to the same villages
each trip, as conditions allow. We have been keeping medical records on the
villagers and have been able to see that our brigades have made a difference.
We work
with Friends of Honduran Children and Hope for Honduran Children.
Several
years ago, Dr. Bill and five others, decided to go to another part of Honduras up on
the NW coast, where we felt there was a greater need for the mountain people." (Lorene Ivanka)
SISTER MARIA ROSA LEGGOL, O.S.F., was a Franciscan sister who
has been called the "Mother Teresa of Honduras", which she
hated. In the 1960s, she organized a group of homes to care for the abandoned
and deprived children of that nation, which became organized as the Sociedad
Amigos de los Niños (SAN). Through the organization, she educated over 80,000
orphans across fifty years.
María Rosa
Leggol was born in 1926 in Puerto Cortés,
Honduras, a major port of Central
America. After her French
Canadian father abandoned her family before her first birthday,
her native mother placed her in an orphanage, where she spent her childhood.
At the age of six, she encountered two School Sisters of St. Francis,
the congregation which she would later
join. Having never seen religious sisters before, she asked a local Catholic
priest about the women. Once he had explained the idea of consecrated
life to her, Maria Rosa immediately determined that it was the
life she wished to follow. Later, at the age of nine, she prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary to help her locate
those sisters so she could begin her new life. As she left the church, she
spotted a train arriving with two School Sisters of St. Francis on board.
Maria Rosa grew
to know the School Sisters of St. Francis, who had come from Germany to serve in Honduras, and repeatedly sought to
enter the congregation. However, because she only had five years of formal
education, the sisters were hesitant to accept her. After much effort and
perseverance, she was accepted in 1948 at the age of 21. They brought her to
the United States to begin
her formation in the novitiate of their American province, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
After her
profession, Sister María Rosa was sent back to Honduras and
assigned to work in a hospital in the capital, Tegucigalpa. Assigned as the night shift
supervisor, she developed a reputation as a committed caregiver. As
a former orphan, she was especially concerned for the city's poorest children,
many of whom had jailed parents. Since entire families were frequently
imprisoned, children would be left without education and exposed to potential
abuse.By the early 1960s, Sister María Rosa decided that she would need to start a movement that could effectively aid local children. While still working at
night, she began using her daytime hours to seek locations for a home for the
children. After identifying a neighborhood designated as low-income housing,
she registered for 10 homes without any personal assets. She obtained the
permission of the Provincial Superior in Milwaukee to proceed with the project,
but failed to advise the Mother Superior of her convent about it.
Only when the developer called the convent, seeking the down payment for the
houses, did the Superior learn
about the plan, at which point she made it clear to Sister Maria Rosa that she
would have to find the funding entirely on her own.
Through the
tip of a grateful patient, she learned of grants being made available by
President John F. Kennedy's Alliance
for Progress, established to help the people of Latin
America. After gaining sponsorships from many business leaders,
she earned enough grant funds and purchased the homes. Even though these homes
reached their initial capacity, she continued to take in children from a local
penitentiary, receiving beds from a local sponsor and food from the United
States Air Force.
Sister María
Rosa took in the first group of children in 1964. In 1966,
she founded SAN to progressively
increase shelters for Honduras'
children, a population which is neglected, abandoned, abused, and orphaned at
one of the highest rates in the Western Hemisphere.
Scattered across Honduras,
SAN currently has group homes for over 160 children, an agricultural training
center for teenage boys, schools, and a hospital.As news of
SAN's operations spread, Sister was inundated with children she rescued from
prisons, orphans referred by social services, and abandoned or street kids that
walked long distances on the rumor of a meal and a bed from the "nun who
helps children."
The Austrian charity
S.O.S. Kinderdorff asked Sister Maria Rosa to collaborate in building hundreds
more children's homes in Honduras,
as well as throughout Central and South America. While she
used their financial support of roughly $500,000 per year to improve housing,
she eventually deemed their regulations too restrictive for effective care,
cutting ties in 1989 and fundraising on her own.[
During the
devastation in Honduras
caused by Hurricane
Fifi in 1974, which killed up to 10,000 Hondurans, Sister Naria Rosa and
her staff went house to house, evacuating people from the flooding. When she
heard a distant child's cries, she swam until she found the baby on a
mattress floating in the flood waters, bringing it back to safety.
She served as the Director of the Society until her death on 16 October 2020.Sister
María Rosa was hospitalized and tested positive for coronavirus COVID-19 in July of 2020. She was released to recover at home on 18
August 2020. She died
that October.
Among the many awards presented to her:
Marquette
University- Honoris
Causa, an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 2009 "for exemplifying
the spirit of magis and being a woman for others," on the occasion of the
60th anniversary of her profession.
The Good
Samaritan Award in 1977, given by the National Catholic Development Conference
in New
York City to "individuals who have devoted themselves to
good work through humanitarian love."
University of Saint Francis Xavier of Antigonish, Canada - Honoris
Causa
A postage
stamp was issued in her honor by the government of Honduras in recognition of her
enormous efforts on behalf of the children.
A documentary
film, WITH THIS LIGHT, was released in 2022 and a
book of her life and work, “Madre: The Nun Who Was Mother to the Orphans of
Honduras”, by Kathy Martin O’ Neil also released in 2022.We are grateful for people like Lorene who carry on this nuns work for the poor of our world.