María Rosa Leggol

Leggol served as the Director of the Society until her death on 16 October 2020.

Sister María Rosa Leggol was hospitalized and tested positive for the novel coronavirus COVID-19 on 10 July 2020. She was released to recover at home on 18 August 2020.

As news of SAN's operations spread, Leggol 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, Leggol 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 sleeping on a mattress floating in the flood waters, bringing it back to safety.

María Rosa Leggol took in the first group of children in 1964. In 1966, she founded Sociedad Amigos de los Niños (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.

Sister María Rosa Leggol, O.S.F., was a Honduran Franciscan Religious Sister who has been called the "Mother Teresa" of Honduras. 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 40,000 orphans across fifty years. Her cause for canonization is underway.

By the early 1960s, María Rosa Leggol decided that she would need to start any movement that could effectively aid local children. While still working at night, the Sister started 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. Leggol 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 Leggol that she would have to find the funding entirely on her own.

Leggol 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, Leggol was accepted by the School Sisters 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. By an interesting coincidence, she entered with an American, Diane Drufenbrock, who became a member of the Socialist Party USA in 1976 and ran as their candidate for Vice President of the United States in the 1980 presidential campaign. They and the rest of their class completed their year of formation and made their profession on 13 June 1949.

María Rosa Leggol was born on 21 November 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 (abbreviated in the United States as S.S.S.F), 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, Leggol immediately determined that it was the life she wished to follow. Later, at the age of nine, Leggol 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.