Rosseau, Leoncia Rosado
(1912– ), evangelist, social activist.

Pioneer Puerto Rican Pentecostal woman evangelist, drug rehabilitation program founder, and cofounder of the Damascus Christian Church, "Mama Leo," as Rosado Rosseau is affectionately known, was born on April 11, 1912, in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico. The second of five children, she was converted during a revival sweeping the Disciples of Christ Church on the island in 1932. Shortly thereafter she became a Pentecostal and received her religious calling to go into the ministry. She preached all over Puerto Rico and had to battle sexism in the ministry. She claims that "Nosotras las mujeres no trataban como soldado de 3ra clase" (We women were treated as third-class soldiers). She claims to have received a vision from God to carry the Pentecostal message to the Spanish-speaking population in New York City. In September 1935 she left Puerto Rico for New York City, where she came under the healing ministry of Francisco Olazábal in Spanish Harlem. In 1937 she received her certificate of divinity. After Olazábal's death, she and her husband, Francisco, left the Latin American Council of Christian Churches and founded Damascus Christian Church (DCC) in Spanish Harlem in 1939. By 1987 the DCC numbered fifty-six churches in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Ecuador, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Although targeted to the Spanish-speaking population, the DCC opened its first English-language ministry in 1981.

Rosado Rosseau is famous not only for her allegedly powerful preaching style, healing ministry, and mystical experiences but also for founding the Damascus Youth Crusade drug rehabilitation program in 1957. This was one of the first grassroots rehab programs founded within a church in New York City. It provided rehabilitation for drug addicts, alcoholics, ex-convicts, prostitutes, and gang members. An estimated 250 to 300 young people have gone through her rehab program into the Christian ministry. Her evangelistic social ministry has attracted the attention of New York City mayors and governors such as Nelson Rockefeller. At age eighty-five she was still pastoring her own church and ministering in her drug rehab programs.

Rosado Rosseau has served as a pioneer in urban ministry and as a role model for young women seeking to go into the ministry.

See alsoDrugs; Evangelical Christianity; Feminist Spirituality; Latino Traditions; Ministry; Ordination of Women; Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.

Bibliography

Korrol, Virginia Sánchez. "In Search of Unconventional Women: Histories of Puerto Rican Women in Religious Vocations Before Midcentury." In Barrios and Borderlands, edited by Denis Lynn Daly Heyck. 1994.

Villafañe, Eldin. The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic. 1992.

Gastón Espinosa