The Delegation

The Sons of Divine Providence — in Italian Figli della Divina Provvidenza, and known almost everywhere simply as the Orionine Fathers — are a Roman Catholic religious institute founded in 1893 by St. Luigi Orione. Our headquarters are in Rome, and our religious serve in 34 countries.

What holds this family together across continents is not a method but a charism: charity without borders towards the poorest, and the conviction of our Founder that only charity will save the world. Wherever the Congregation goes, it looks for the people at the edges — the child no one expects anything from, the elderly person left alone, the young man with no work and no way to begin.

In Kenya that family carries a name: the Delegation “Our Lady of the Rosary”.

The first Orionine presence in Kenya was not ours. In 1979 the Little Missionary Sisters of Charity — founded by the same St. Luigi Orione — came to this country. It was through the Sisters, and through the young people who came to know the charism in their works, that the Congregation discovered its first Kenyan vocations. The mission of the Sons of Divine Providence in Kenya began, in a real sense, as an answer to young Kenyans who were already knocking at the door.

In 1996 Fr. Giuseppe Vallauri was sent to Kenya and opened the first formation house on Langata South Road, in Karen, Nairobi. It is still the mother house of the mission, and today the seat of the Delegation.

In 1998 the Congregation accepted St. Peter’s Parish in Kaburugi, in the Diocese of Murang’a. In 1999 the mission of Kandisi began, on the edge of Maasai land. In November 2005 Fr. Peter Wambulwa was ordained: the first Kenyan Orionine priest — a moment when the mission stopped being something brought to Kenya and became something Kenya itself was giving to the Congregation.

On 12 March 2024, in Tortona — the town where St. Luigi Orione began the Little Work of Divine Providence, and where he died on that same day in 1940 — the Delegation “Our Lady of the Rosary” was formally erected. Twenty-eight years of growth had made it possible.

The Delegation is formed by the religious of the communities in Kenya and by the Kenyan religious serving elsewhere in the Congregation; its headquarters are in Nairobi. At the moment of its erection it counted 21 Kenyan religious in perpetual vows, 15 in temporary vows and 3 novices.

The name was not chosen by accident. The Rosary is the prayer of ordinary people, prayed in kitchens and on long walks and in small chapels at the end of dirt roads — which is exactly where this Delegation lives.

Today the Delegation comprises eight communities — five parishes and three formation houses — together with two projects run directly by the Delegation. We are present in the dioceses of Nairobi, Ngong, Murang’a, Meru and Kisumu, with the aspirancy in the Diocese of Nakuru.

Around these communities are gathered two Orione Community Training Centres for children and youth with intellectual disabilities, nursery and primary schools, an academy, dispensaries, farms and training projects — and, above all, the people of the places we serve.

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