Madre: The Nun Who Was Mother to the Orphans of Honduras

“Children have the right to be happy. So God sent me to help them.” —Sister Maria Rosa Leggol
In Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, in 1966, a short, plump, middle-aged Catholic nun was hot on the heels of the richest man in the country. Sister María Rosa Leggol, a hospital nurse with a fifth-grade education, had no money, no social standing, no clout. What she did have was the audacity to ask big favors of powerful men and the unwavering conviction that her dream—to rescue, house, and educate street children—was sanctioned by God.
She also had the gall to think she could stop the man’s airplane from taking off.
The help she received that day triggered a dramatic chain of events resulting in the rescue and education of tens of thousands of destitute children in the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Through her network of children’s villages, schools, farms, clinics, vocational training centers, and microbusinesses, this indomitable nun empowered poor Hondurans to live, grow, and work with dignity. Madre is a celebration of a fearless woman’s great goodness, charisma, and chutzpah in challenging corruption and machismo to break generational cycles of poverty.
Writer and mission trip leader Kathy Martin O’Neil sets the unlikely triumphs of this “Angel of the Poor” against the backdrop of Honduras’s deprivation, broken families, and gang violence that send desperate young migrants fleeing for their lives. Drawing from more than a decade of mission travel to SAN, she captures Sister Maria Rosa’s magnetic allure and Franciscan wisdom on how best to change hearts and stand with the marginalized people of the world. Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodriguez of Honduras, who is advancing her cause for sainthood, introduces his friend, Sister María Rosa Leggol, in a beautiful Foreword.