MADRE of HONDURAS

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.