Faith in History / Sean Gallagher

St. Marianne Cope collaborated with St. Damien of Molokai in Hawaii

In the last “Faith in History” column, we learned about the life of St. Damien of Molokai, one of 10 American saints whose lives we’ve been exploring in this year of the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country.

Other religious came to Hawaii to contribute to the ministry of St. Damien. One turned out to be another American saint: St. Marianne Cope.

Born in 1838 in what is now Germany, she was brought the following year by her immigrant parents to upstate New York.

After her father became disabled in the 1850s, she worked in a textile factory to help support her family. She was 24 when she was finally able to follow her long-desired calling to religious life, joining a community of Franciscan sisters in Syracuse, N.Y.

St. Marianne soon showed great leadership abilities, helping to found the first two Catholic hospitals in central New York and serving as the administrator of one of them.

In 1883, she was serving as the superior of her community when the king of Hawaii, then an independent nation, sent a request to the Franciscans in which he asked them to send sisters to help care for the lepers there. More than 50 other communities had declined the invitation. But not St. Marianne.

Her desire for holiness can be seen in the words of her reply:

“I am hungry for the work and I wish with all my heart to be one of the chosen ones whose privilege it will be to sacrifice themselves for the salvation of the souls of the poor Islanders. … I am not afraid of any disease, hence it would be my greatest delight even to minister to the abandoned ‘lepers.’ ”

In wholeheartedly embracing this ministry to people with leprosy, St. Marianne was following in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi, who founded the family of religious communities of which her community was a member.

In a turning point in his conversion to a life deeply modeled on Christ, Francis famously embraced a leper on a road outside of Assisi. Before that, he had loathed people with the disease, much like the rest of society of his time did. In that encounter in 1206, he had begun to see Christ himself in them. That was the approach that St. Marianne Cope took when she answered the call to go to Hawaii.

She arrived in Honolulu in late 1883 with six other sisters. St. Marianne soon embraced the work that she had done so well in New York, founding one hospital and serving as the administrator of another. She also was a firm advocate for more humane treatment of Hawaii’s lepers.

St. Marianne had originally planned to return to Syracuse the following year to take up her duties as her community’s superior. But the increasing demands of the sisters’ ministry in Hawaii delayed her departure.

As it happened, St. Marianne never returned to New York. Her wish to sacrifice herself in her ministry to the Hawaiians suffering from leprosy was ultimately fulfilled, although she did not die of the disease like St. Damien did.

In 1887, St. Marianne and her sisters started a home for women and girls in the leper colony on Molokai where St. Damien was ministering and where he would die two years later.

St. Marianne died of natural causes on Aug. 9, 1918, at the age of 80. Her remains were sent to Syracuse for burial, but were returned in 2014 to Honolulu. She was declared blessed in 2005 and a saint in 2012. Her feast is celebrated on Jan. 23. St. Marianne Cope, pray for us. †