An architect’s drawing of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace with the reliquary chapel that will be the future home of the remains of St. Marianne Cope. (HCH file photo)
The relics will be kept in a small reliquary chapel that will be added to the mauka side of the cathedral as part of the ongoing renovation of the 173-year-old church. The chapel will also house a relic of St. Damien de Veuster.
St. Marianne’s remains are a collection of bones sealed in a 48-by-20-by-12 inch metal box which is encased in a large polished wood reliquary in St. Anthony Convent Chapel in Syracuse.
The relocation of St. Marianne’s remains will follow the closing next year of the Court Street motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities, St. Marianne’s congregation. The changes were announced in Syracuse on Dec. 19.
According to a news release, the motherhouse buildings “are no longer structurally sound.” The 75 sisters who reside there will move to the new Franciscan Villas in another part of Syracuse this coming summer.
Also moving from the motherhouse to a new location will be the Shrine and Museum of Saint Marianne Cope. The collection of the saint’s historical artifacts and records will go to St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, where a radiology building is being renovated to accommodate new museum galleries, a gift shop, archives and staff offices.
The community hopes to sell the Court Street campus.
The financial demands placed on the community by the extensive relocation was one of the reasons the sisters are bringing the saint’s remains back to Hawaii.
Planning ahead, “we realized we did not have the sustainability,” said Sister Roberta Smith, the general minister of the congregation.
The decision to relocate the remains was made by the congregation’s six-person governing board after some “canvassing of the community,” Sister Roberta said.
She said the “sisters aren’t too surprised by this decision, though some are disappointed.”
“Most were open to whatever decision leadership made,” she said. “A goodly number thought it was right that she return to where her healing ministry blossomed in Hawaii.”
The remains will still belong to the Sisters of St. Francis, Sister Roberta said.
“She belongs to the community,” she said. “She will always be part of us.”
The sisters need the permissions of both the bishops of Syracuse and Honolulu to make the move, which is expected, and authorization from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
The Sisters of St. Francis, in a statement, said it “made sense” to return the remains to Hawaii.
“When St. Marianne’s remains were moved to Syracuse during the canonization process, it made sense to bring her home to the center of the community of sisters,” she said. “It allowed St. Marianne to be reintroduced to the people in Syracuse. It now makes sense to return St. Marianne to her final resting place alongside St. Damien.”
The museum at St. Joseph Hospital will also include a shrine with a first class relic of the saint to be kept in the large wooden reliquary now holding the remains in St. Anthony Chapel.
“Having her at St. Joseph Hospital and Health Center will be a source of great hope for people,” Sister Roberta said. Mother Marianne had been assigned to St. Joseph before coming to Hawaii.
“She was very instrumental there doing healing ministry,” she said.
Bishop Silva said he was contacted by the Sisters of St. Francis about two months ago about the possibility of the saint’s remains returning to Hawaii.
“I told them we would be excited and honored to have St. Marianne’s remains back in Hawaii, where she dedicated so much of her saintly life to the care of the patients with Hansen’s disease,” the bishop said.
The bishop said that the small chapel that is planned as an attachment to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace is part of a $12 million restoration that will “accommodate current liturgical and worship needs, yet remind us of the days when St. Marianne and her sisters first worshipped there upon their arrival in Honolulu.”
He said that if the relics are received before the reliquary chapel is built, “we will find another suitable place at which the relics can be venerated until the permanent shrine is completed.”
Alika Cullen, the general administrator of the cathedral, said the restoration work is expected to take two years.
Bishop Silva said that the cathedral’s central location, which serves both Hawaii’s “many visitors” and local residents, “will allow many people to come and be inspired by St. Marianne and St. Damien.”
St. Marianne Cope and six companion sisters arrived in Hawaii in 1883 from Syracuse, N.Y., to care for the natives with Hansen’s disease. Shortly afterward, she opened Malulani Hospital on Maui and the Kapiolani Home for the healthy children of leprosy patients.
In 1888, she went to Kalaupapa to run Bishop Home, a complex of cottages for the female patients. In the 125 years that followed, approximately 65 Sisters of St. Francis have served there as nurses and health care workers.
St. Marianne died in Kalaupapa in 1918 and was the only Sister of St. Francis to be buried there. Her body was exhumed in 2005 as required for her beatification and her remains brought to the Syracuse motherhouse where a shrine was erected.
The remains of Father Damien, who died and was buried in Kalaupapa in 1889, were exhumed in 1936 and enshrined in his homeland of Belgium. On the occasion of his 1995 beatification, the bones of St. Damien’s right hand were reinterred in his original Kalaupapa grave.
Small relics of both St. Damien and St. Marianne are now on display in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace.
