After a 10-year fight, parishioners of the shuttered La Milagrosa Chapel on Spring Garden score a victory — of sorts

For more than 100 years, La Milagrosa, a small Roman Catholic chapel in Spring Garden, was the cornerstone for newly arriving Spanish-speaking Catholics in Philadelphia.

It was, for many years, the only place where Catholics could attend a Mass entirely in Spanish.

For Spanish-speaking laity, La Milagrosa was “our Plymouth Rock,” a parishioner told Catholic Philly.

“That was our Liberty Bell,” Maria Miranda told The Inquirer, when she talked about the chapel that had been at 1903 Spring Garden St. since 1912.

And for many, the chapel was more than a place of worship.

To Miguel Ortiz, who came to Philadelphia alone from Mexico at age 18 or 19, some 30 years ago only speaking Spanish, La Milagrosa became the family he was missing in his hometown of Puebla.

He was lonely. His father had been killed in a car accident back home. And now he had to remain in Philadelphia to support his mother and siblings in Mexico. His plan had been to earn enough money to return home and go to college. He had dreams of becoming an architect.

At La Milagrosa, the anger he felt evaporated when the middle-aged women he met there fed him and welcomed him like a son.

His faith in God deepened, he said. The connection he felt to the community was as miraculous as the name La Milagrosa — “the Miraculous one.”

“I went through a moment of crisis,” Ortiz, now 51 and a maintenance worker for a Center City real estate company, said. “I was literally looking for some peace in my soul, for some family affection. I didn’t know the language like I know it now. I got there. I saw all these old ladies, and they treated me like a family member.”

In September 2012, Ortiz was one of the parish congregants who were angry and hurt to learn that the chapel in the stone rowhouse on Spring Garden was going to be sold — and converted into condos.

Some parishioners and members of the Latino communities in Philadelphia tried to fight the sale. They organized as Salvemos La Milagrosa, or (Let’s) Save La Milagrosa.

They protested outside the chapel with picket signs and prayers. Older women sat in folding chairs praying the rosary. One night they prayed huddled under umbrellas in the rain. Community members held fundraisers.

“These were grandmothers who sold dinners and made food to sell at the end of each Mass on Sunday,” said Ortiz, one of the Save La Milagrosa leaders. “We set up a flea market on the sidewalk in front of the church.”

Save La Milagrosa raised $31,000, but it wasn’t enough.

The chapel was sold in 2013 for $750,000. Today, 1903 Spring Garden is a renovated condo building.

While the chapel no longer exists, Salvemos La Milagrosa has managed to save La Milagrosa’s name.

A trust to benefit the church that had been set up by longtime La Milagrosa parishioner Hilda Pereira was terminated in Orphans’ Court Division of Common Pleas Court in late 2021.The trust’s assets, some $459,000, began to be turned over to the Philadelphia Foundation for the establishment of the new La Milagrosa/Quintana-Pereira Scholarship starting in 2022.

“We lost La Milagrosa, but we kept the name, and we are adding the names of two important Latina women who helped the church over the years,” Ortiz said.

The fund scholarship will give preference to Spanish-speaking students from the Fairmount neighborhood where La Milagrosa was a beacon for 101 years.

The scholarship “honors the memory of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Chapel, or La Milagrosa, which provided a warm and welcoming haven for the Spanish-speaking community of Philadelphia for 100 years; and it honors the two women whose generosity kept the chapel alive for that century and beyond,” says a statement on the Philadelphia Foundation website.

In 1908, a priest from the Vincentian Order in Barcelona, Spain, arrived in Philadelphia and began celebrating Mass in Spanish at Old St. Mary’s Church in what is now Old City.

About the same time, Sister Agatha Quintana, a Sister of Charity and the daughter of a wealthy cattle rancher in California, was assigned to work at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Philadelphia. She urged the Vincentians to establish their own church and pledged to support the mission with a $30,000 donation. The Vincentians purchased the rowhouse on Spring Garden in 1912. Records show that Quintana donated the money several years after the church opened.

Nearly 70 years after La Milagrosa opened on Spring Garden, parishioner Hilda Pereira bought a nearby property at 2019-23 Green St. to serve as a parish hall. It would be used for weddings, baptisms and other religious and recreational purposes.

In July 1978, Pereira established Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Roman Catholic Parish Trust, listing herself as the donor and a co-trustee. The trust document also listed attorney Miguel A. Leon, as the second co-trustee.

In a recent statement to the community, Save La Milagrosa said while [its members were] working to save the church from being sold “the committee discovered the existence of a trust that had been established for the benefit of the Chapel’s members.”

“Had it been available to the parishioners, the trust funds might have been sufficient to save the Chapel,” the statement continued

Leon did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story.

Court records showed that Pereira died “some years after the trust was created.” In November 2004, Miguel A. Leon named his brother, Edward “Eddie” Leon, as a second co-trustee to fill the vacancy left by Pereira’s death.

A little more than a month after adding his brother as a co-trustee, on Dec. 28, 2004, the Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal trust sold the parish hall on Green Street for $530,000 to Green Street Collaborative Limited Partnership, court documents show.

After closing costs, net proceeds of $448,353.42 were paid to the trust.

It took a seven-year fight in Orphans’ Court, from 2014 to 2021, and a lawsuit filed by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office for the new La Milagrosa/Quintana-Pereira Scholarship to be established.

Ortiz and other members of Save La Milagrosa took their concerns to Jennifer Clarke, then-director of the Public Interest Law Center, to ask for help.

Clarke, who has since retired from the law center, reached out to attorneys Thomas K. Johnson II, now at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, and Jeffrey Rubin, an attorney at Dechert LLP, who were experts in trust law. At the time, both attorneys were at the Dechert firm and agreed to take on the case pro bono.

The trust lawyers alerted the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office, and the AG’s Office filed a lawsuit in 2014, seeking an accounting about the funds from the trust, Rubin said.

The lawsuit called for an audit of the trust to account for the period from Dec. 28, 2004 (the date of the sale of Pereira’s property) until March 31, 2014.

In one court document dated Jan. 15, 2019, Common Pleas Court Judge Matthew D. Carrafiello said “the failures of the Trustees were significant.”

At that time, Carafiello noted that the trust had been awarding scholarships to Latino students to attend Catholic parochial and high schools in the city.

In the filing dated May 2019, he noted that, “Over the account period, income of $92,938.69 was generated, and $94,400 was distributed in scholarships to students.”

While the co-trustees followed the intent of the donor in funding scholarships, the judge wrote, “it was clear from the testimony that their fiduciary skills were lacking.”

“No records were kept of the Trust activities prior to the sale of the real estate in 2004, and the management of the real estate was left to members of the community, without any oversight,” Carafiello wrote.

At that time, in 2019, Carafiello denied the attorney general’s request to remove the Leons as trustees.

“No proof was provided by the Attorney General’s office evidencing any losses or damages sustained by the Trust due to theses failures,” Carafiello wrote.

It would not be until October 2021, when the judge dissolved the trust and awarded its assets to the Philadelphia Foundation “to administer the funds as a scholarship fund with preference given to Spanish-speaking residents of the Fairmount section of Philadelphia.”

And last month, Ortiz was working on a draft statement with Brenda Marerro, the current executive director of Public Interest Law Center, to announce that the $31,000 raised by the Save La Milagrosa group and held by the law center will be transferred to the new La Milagrosa/Quintana-Pereira Scholarship Fund at the Philadelphia Foundation.

Clarke, the retired law center director, said because the chapel had already been sold, all parties in the litigation agreed that using the trust’s funds for college scholarships was a kind of victory.

”It’s very bittersweet that we weren’t able to find the money in time to prevent the sale of the chapel,” Clarke said.

“But on the other hand, it [the fight to save the church] connected people. It gave people a purpose and provided an opportunity for leadership in the community to grow. And having this scholarship at the Philadelphia Foundation is incredible.”