The final major event for the canonization of Hawaii’s new saint is attended by the apostolic nuncio, the president of the U.S. bishops conference, the bishop of Syracuse and hundreds more
Hawaii held its final major event celebrating the canonization of St. Marianne Cope in the same place she practiced her inexhaustible charity, mostly unseen, for three decades.
On Jan. 12, in Kalaupapa, at Bishop Home, the former destination of scores of women and girls with Hansen’s disease and Mother Marianne’s home from 1888 to 1918, hundreds of people gathered to celebrate Molokai’s second saint with a Mass, music, a luau, a play and an abundance of camaraderie.
Special guests of Bishop Larry Silva included apostolic nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, Pope Benedict XVI’s representative to the United States; Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; and Bishop Robert Cunningham, the Bishop of Syracuse, N.Y., where St. Marianne lived the first half of her life.
All three bishops had attended the canonization of Mother Marianne Cope by Pope Benedict XVI in Rome on Oct. 21. None of them had ever before been to Hawaii.
Also present was Bishop Peter Paul Yelesuome Angkyier of the Diocese of Damongo, Ghana.
The week of rain and gusty winds that preceding the event ended early on the morning of the celebration, leaving the settlement uncommonly green, wet, refreshed and still.
Seventeen Makani Kai Air flights delivered the outside guests, mostly from Honolulu, nine passengers at a time, to the tiny airport over a span of three hours. At the airport terminal, a large hand-painted banner displayed the words “Celebrate St. Marianne” surrounded by a painted lei of pink flowers and green maile.
Arriving early, the visiting bishops were given a brief tour of the peninsula’s key landmarks, stopping first at St. Francis Church in Kalaupapa town. They then drove three miles to St. Philomena Church in Kalawao on the peninsula’s east side.
At St. Philomena, Cardinal Dolan led the bishops in morning prayer and Bishop Silva spoke about the history of the church and its connection to St. Damien.
The group paused for a moment of reflection at the saint’s grave outside and ended the tour at the spot overlooking the scenic landing area at the base of the towering cliffs.
The rest of the guests gathered at Bishop Home in the center of Kalaupapa town where the National Park Service had set up four tents for Mass, one each for the altar, a visiting strings group and the choir, and a large one for the congregation.
National Parks personnel offered tours, exhibits were on display and literature and memorabilia were for sale. Visitors also gathered at St. Marianne’s original tomb on the edge of the Bishop Home property with its nearly life-sized statue of Jesus reaching down from the cross to exchange an embrace with St. Francis.
The sun broke through the clouds at 9:45, about 15 minutes before the start of Mass and when the 10 violins and five cellos of the Iolani Hawaii Suzuki Strings Tour Group began a brief concert of religious and secular music.
According to the group’s director Katharine Hafner, the group from Iolani High School in Honolulu travels the world giving concerts and had asked to be a part of this celebration. She said the group’s purpose is cultural and educational — to “share aloha with other people in other parts of the world.”
The strings also provided accompaniment for some of the music during Mass.
Also before Mass, Na Wahine o Kalawao, a hula halau comprised of Kalaupapa patients and government employees dressed in black holoku and wearing long multiple strands of white shell lei, danced to “O Makalapua,” said to be St. Marianne’s favorite song, and the hymn “Saint Marianne.”
Bishop Silva presided at the Mass accompanied by the visiting bishops, 11 priests and five deacons.
Providing the liturgical music were a dozen members of the St. John Vianney Parish Choir from Kailua, Oahu, frequent visitors to Kalaupapa, led by Calvin Liu, Robert Mondoy and Kainoa Fujimoto.
In his homily, Bishop Silva used the metaphor of a “rising star” to describe the shining talent, the luminous charity and the bright sanctity of St. Marianne.
“This rising star quickly changed the darkness, neglect, and filth of a warehouse for the rejected into a place of light, dignity, and joy,” he said.
But “she knew that her light was a mere guiding star to the merciful healing brilliance of Christ,” he said, “and that day by day he would grow greater as she became smaller, ever narrowing her world.”
“Mother Marianne was not just a star that flashed in the heavens long ago, but she has now been fixed as a heavenly light for all time, so that she can continue to shine on Christ wherever he may be found,” Bishop Silva said.
“We thank God for sending this star to us, for setting her forever in the firmament of heaven, and for making her our living lesson that making ourselves smaller and more obscure brightens the world all the more with the light of Jesus Christ our Lord,” he said. “We thank God for Saint Marianne Cope!”
Celebration so full of grace
In remarks spoken at the end of Mass, Archbishop Vigano thanked Bishop Silva for inviting him to “share this great joy with all these people, priests and bishops who are joined in this celebration so beautiful, so full of grace.”
“I have come to touch the soil that is very much alive with the sanctity of the charity of Mother Marianne,” he said.
“Her love was so great that she was able to spend all her life in charity, being able to recognize in every human being the presence of God, and being herself a humble servant of each one that needed her help,” the archbishop said.
“Today I have come to a light source of sanctity — a light because Marianne is spreading her grace and her generosity to us, inspiring us to continue in her footsteps.”
“This day is full of mercy and reward for each one of us, and particularly for me,” said Archbishop Vigano. “I will certainly tell the Holy Father … how all the people of Hawaii have recognized the gift that has been given to them by the Lord through St. Marianne.”
Sister Roberta Smith of Syracuse, general minister of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities, also addressed the congregation after the Mass.
Although Mother Marianne has earned the title “saint,” Sister Roberta said she still preferred to call her “Mother” — “because such was truly her quality.”
“She was a mother,” she said. “She was somebody who had the courage and tender compassion to respond to a need that went out throughout the whole world.”
“Her virtues modeled for us today send a message for us to go and to likewise,” Sister Roberta said. “We would do her a great disservice if we only just remembered her. … It is her example of self-sacrificing love that calls us over the decades and calls us to follow her example.”
“Like Christ, like St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi, and like St. Damien, her life echoes what we truly care about and what we wish to emulate in the deepest parts of our being,” she said.
Sister Roberta said “the living legacy of Mother Marianne” would be the same as St. Francis’ instruction, “I have done what is mine to do, may Christ teach you what is yours to do.”
“May we have the courage and compassion and tenderness and kindness to respond likewise to those in need,” she said.
The pride of Kalawao County
Gloria Marks, president of the Kalaupapa Patients Advisory Council, thanked Bishop Silva and the Sisters of St. Francis for allowing Kalaupapa’s patients to “go the second time to Rome,” to attend the Oct. 21 canonization of Mother Marianne, the first time being in 2009 for the canonization of St. Damien.
She said that she especially enjoyed the side trip to Syracuse, where she noted to a Sister of St. Francis that her order was “going all out” in celebrating Mother Marianne, perhaps to the point, she lightheartedly suggested, of outshining St. Damien.
All the same, Marks said, it is tiny Kalawao County, which encompasses the Kalaupapa peninsula, that outshines Hawaii’s other four counties and even the entire state.
“We may have a president born in Hawaii, but we have two saints here in Kalawao,” she said.
Saints beat them all, she said.
After Mass, a luau in McVeigh Hall served the standard fare of kalua pig and poi, sweet potato and lomi salmon, plus a variety of raw fish and crab.
In the afternoon, in the newly renovated Paschoal Hall, Eva Andrade performed twice a shortened version of “November’s Song,” the 25-year-old biographical monologue about St. Marianne by George Herman and Sister Mary Laurence Hanley that Andrade had revived to commemorate the canonization.
Paschoal Hall, a 200-plus seat auditorium where movies and plays used to entertain the patients, dates back to St. Marianne’s final years. It had been shuttered for more than 30 years before a renovation effort made possible by funding secured by the late Sen. Daniel Inouye reopened the hall last October.
Three yellow school buses and passenger vans shuttled some around the settlement while others walked the short distances between activities.
Hospitality and friendship
Speaking to the Hawaii Catholic Herald after the luau, Bishop Cunningham said it was “a very moving experience” to be in Kalaupapa and to meet and “rejoice with” the current residents.
“I’m enjoying the warmth of their hospitality and the friendship,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of new people and heard a lot of new things and it just makes me want to learn more and more about Mother Marianne and about the people here at Kalaupapa and the Diocese of Honolulu.”
Bishop Cunningham said he has long known and admired the work of the Franciscan Sisters “and their dedication to serve the needs of people in education and healthcare and their pastoral ministry.”
“So it’s a great honor to come this far and to see how these people have worked here,” he said. “There’s a close bond of connection and affection between the sisters here and the sisters in Syracuse.”
The Syracuse diocese has been celebrating their famous daughter in many ways, he said.
“We had a big Mass at our cathedral on the Sunday after the canonization. And there have been celebrations at individual parishes,” he said. “We put a mosaic in our cathedral honoring Mother Marianne, and there’s other events being scheduled for her feast day at the Church of the Assumption, where she entered religious life.
“So there’s a lot of good things going on,” he said. “I think the way we honor her most is to carry on the variety of her work, and the vocation of the sisters to take care of the poor and the needy and the sick and in education.”
Also commenting later in the day, Archbishop Vigano said that the actions of Sts. Damien and Marianne have made the land of Kalaupapa holy.
Sanctity is “in direct relation with the incarnation,” he said. “The same way Our Lord Jesus Christ is truly man and makes us his brothers able to call our God Father, the saints are, in a modern way, the incarnation of the sanctity of the Christ life.”
“So they have not only given us their own example,” he said, they have blessed the land.
“Somehow we have to say, ‘Look where are you walking,’” he said, “because this is blessed land. This is a special place; you feel that you are very blessed to be here.”
A lot of coordination and support
The day-long event was coordinated and hosted by the National Park Service, “with a lot of help and support from the Sisters of St. Francis, the Diocese of Honolulu and the state Department of Health,” said Kalaupapa National Historical Park superintendent Steve Prokop.
Seawind Tours and Travel of Honolulu, which handled pilgrimage travel to the canonization in Rome, arranged the air travel to and from Kalaupapa.
Managing the event on the diocese’s side was Deacon Wallace Mitsui, the diocesan canonization events coordinator.
Crucial to the planning, Prokop said, was the input of Kalaupapa’s Patient Advisory Council which represents the settlement’s patient residents.
Also making a significant contribution, Prokop said, was Pacific Historic Parks, a “cooperating service” with the National Park Service, which contributed $25,000 to create the exhibits on display that day.
“An event like this really brings the whole community together,” Prokop said, “because we all have a common purpose … to honor Mother Marianne and the patients of Kalaupapa, who are really the glue that keeps our community together.”
“Our mission here at Kalaupapa is to interpret the stories of the people of Kalaupapa and to preserve those stories,” Prokop said. “People such as Mother Marianne, who is a central to many of the stories, is why we wanted to put on a really glorious celebration today.”
Prokop said that while 500 were signed up to attend the event, the bad weather prior probably kept some away, although on the day of the event he did not have an exact count. The number of attendees to the invitation-only event was a rare exception to settlement rules which limit visitors to 100 a day.
He said Kalaupapa brought in about 25 outside support staff from the National Park Service, the Department of Transportation, Maui County airports, and Maui County fire and police.
Among the guests were officials from the National Park Service including Christine Lehnertz, regional director of the Pacific West Region of the National Parks Service; Sue Masica, regional director for the Alaska region; and Patty Neubacher, deputy director of the Pacific West Region.
Hawaii National Park Officials included Daniel Kawaiaea, superintendent of Puukohola Heiau National Site.
The director of the state Department of Health, Loretta Fuddy, was there along with deputy director Dr. David Sakamoto, and Mark Miller, the Department of Health administrator for Kalaupapa.
Also in attendance was Kippen de Alba Chu, executive director of Iolani Palace.
