Garden of Order, Charity : Nuns Aid Orphans Back in Philippines

Tucked away in a secluded area near here, a small convent of Filipina nuns provides a peaceful retreat for people to practice their faith--and an opportunity to give hope to the unfortunate half a world away.

It is here, in a quiet wooded area near the intersection of El Toro and Live Oak Canyon roads, that Filipino families from across the Southland come not only for solace but instruction.

Dissatisfied with what they consider the watered-down teaching in U.S. churches, many Filipinos entrust the Dominican nuns, who adhere to a strictly orthodox Roman Catholic curricula, to prepare their children for first Communion.

In turn, the generosity of the Filipino community is enabling the nuns’ order to fulfill a goal of providing shelter and schooling for orphan girls in the Philippines.

The convent, opened 13 years ago, has become a magnet for the Southland’s burgeoning, predominantly Catholic Filipino population, including 30,000 who live in Orange County. Filipino families regularly come to the convent from as far away as San Diego and the San Fernando Valley to say the Rosary, a devotion to the Virgin Mary to whom they are especially attached.

Last weekend a Filipino family from Walnut had attended Mass at the convent before heading back to Los Angeles County on rural Santiago Canyon Road. Five members of the family were killed in a head-on collision near Irvine Lake. The driver of the pickup truck that struck their vehicle was also killed.

Mother Mary Natividad Vidal is the leader of the seven nuns who live in the small convent edged with roses at St. Michael’s Abbey, a boys’ school and seminary on a tree-covered hill above El Toro Road.

Vidal said she has not been surprised by the generosity that the nuns have seen since they were invited to the abbey in 1978 to help teach the boys how to operate the kitchen and do the laundry.

“The Lord touches people’s hearts to help,” she said. “We believe and trust the Lord’s work will be provided for.”

Vidal said the nuns “had nothing” when they decided to establish an outpost in the United States in 1972. At that time, she said, her order based in the Philippines severed its relationship with another Dominican order because of concern that other nuns were becoming too modernized.

Unlike other nuns after the Second Vatican Council, she said, the Rosarian order’s sisters wanted to keep their habits and communal way of life.

In appearance, the nuns at St. Michael’s, who wear long black veils under white robes and hoods and black Rosary beads hanging from their waistbands, instantly bring back memories of childhood for any middle-aged U.S. Catholic.

“We promise with this habit to be religious until death,” Vidal said.

She said she believes that the order’s commitment to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience have enabled it to grow and thrive, while other religious orders have had defections and been forced to close novitiates and schools.

Vidal pointed with pride to a picture of the U.S. congregation’s 11 young women on the path to becoming nuns. In all, she said, there are 61 women in the congregation, many of them young.

Vidal acknowledged that the nuns who came to the United States did so with the idea of tapping the financial resources of Southland Filipino-Americans.

While the Philippines is financially destitute by U.S. standards, she said, many Filipinos who have come to the United States in recent years are professionals with substantial incomes, who have a desire to help the less fortunate left behind.

The result of that generosity, Vidal said, is the orphanage that her order opened in the Philippines two years ago.

Displayed on the wall of the convent’s sitting room are snapshots of the orphanage on the island of Panay and of the dark-haired urchins who were the first to be reared there when it opened.

There are now 23 Filipinas in the sisters’ care, and eventually there will be 300. For these children the orphanage provides an alternative to a life of poverty and prostitution--a fate, the nuns say, that often befalls destitute children of the streets.

The nuns’ next project, already partly completed, is to build a school for the orphans and other children in the orphanage’s region. The first four schoolrooms will open in the fall.

Most Filipino-Americans are drawn to the convent by word of mouth, said Tessie Planta, an export administrator at FileNet Corp. in Costa Mesa, who this year is heading the sisters’ fund-raising efforts to complete construction of the orphanage school, expected to cost $60,000.

The orphanage was built for $91,000, Vidal said, not including the furnishings and equipment that were mostly donated by U.S. Filipinos.

Planta said those who regularly travel great distances to visit the convent do so because of its natural beauty and the solemnity of its services.

Filipino professionals have built a stone shrine and patio behind the convent where, on the second Saturday of each month, about 60 people of all ages meet to say the Rosary during nine-hour novenas.

About five years ago, Planta said, she accompanied friends to the convent to pray for her homeland after President Ferdinand E. Marcos was deposed. She said people at the gathering wanted to do something to help.

Vidal, after returning from a visit to the Philippines, suggested building the orphanage.

To raise money for the orphanage and school, the convent has sold tickets to bake sales, barbecues, raffles and dinner dances. Planta said many Filipinos who immigrated to the United States are helping to support their own families in the Philippines.

Nonetheless, Planta said, she and others have agreed to pay $25 a month to support an orphan at the sisters’ behest. Planta and other Filipinos also regularly take donations of children’s clothes and books from their friends and fellow workers to send to the orphanage.

Vidal said one of her hopes is that when the orphans are old enough for college, some of the sponsors may invite them to complete their education in the United States.

A dinner-dance will be held tonight at the Doubletree Hotel in Orange to raise money for school construction. The goal had been to sell 500 tickets, but just 200 have so far been purchased. Planta blamed competing graduation functions and the recession for the shortfall.

But, Planta added: “The sisters always have faith. They say ‘God provides,’ and there is no room for worry for them.”