Forensic archaeologist Vincent Sava passes an object to Father Joseph Grimaldi from the Kalaupapa grave of St. Marianne during the 2005 exhumation of her remains.
St. Marianne is returning to Hawaii.
The bones of the renowned Franciscan missionary, unearthed from her Kalaupapa resting place in 2005 and sent to her shrine in Syracuse, N.Y., in preparation for her beatification that year, will come back to the Islands next month to reside permanently in Honolulu’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace.
The cathedral will receive the remains in a 11 a.m. ceremony on July 31. Mass celebrated by Bishop Larry Silva will follow at noon.
The Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities revealed their decision to relocate the saint’s remains last Dec. 19 with the announcement that they were closing their Court Street motherhouse in Syracuse where the remains have been enshrined in the chapel.
The remains are the full collection of the saint’s bones sealed in a 48-by-20-by-12-inch metal box. At the shrine in St. Anthony Convent Chapel in Syracuse the metal box was enclosed in a large, casket-sized polished wood reliquary.
The remains will arrive by plane in Hawaii on July 27 accompanied by Sister Roberta Smith, general minister of the Sisters of St. Francis, and Sister Geraldine Ching, assistant general minister. The box will be transported from Syracuse in a casket which will stay at the sisters’ convent in Manoa until the July 31 cathedral service.
At the cathedral, plans are to place the box upright in the existing koa and glass display cabinet that now holds a small reliquary with a relic of St. Marianne. The cabinet’s raised “floor” on which the present reliquary sits will have to be removed to fit the much larger metal box.
The financial demands placed on the Sisters of St. Francis by the relocation of their motherhouse, the residence for 75 sisters, was one of the reasons the community decided to bring the saint’s remains back to Hawaii, Sister Roberta said last December.
Planning ahead, “we realized we did not have the sustainability,” she said.
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.
Not all agreed with the decision, she said, but “a goodly number thought it was right that she return to where her healing ministry blossomed in 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,” Sister Roberta said in her statement in December. “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.”
Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities carry the metal box holding the remains of St. Marianne from St. Elizabeth Convent in Kalaupapa in 2005.
The remains will still belong to the Sisters of St. Francis, Sister Roberta said. “She belongs to the community. She will always be part of us.”
Also moving from the motherhouse is St. Marianne’s shrine and museum. It will be housed at the St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, where a radiology building has been renovated to accommodate new museum galleries, a gift shop, archives and staff offices.
St. Marianne Cope and six companion sisters arrived in Hawaii in 1883 from Syracuse to care for 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.
The remains of Father Damien, who died and was buried in Kalawao in 1889, were exhumed in 1936 and enshrined in his homeland of Belgium. On the occasion of his 1995 beatification, the bones of the saint’s right hand, sealed in a zinc box, were reinterred in his original Kalawao grave.
Small relics of both St. Damien and St. Marianne are now on display in the cathedral.
As part of the present renovation of the 173-year-old cathedral, a small reliquary chapel will be built on the mauka side of the church to house the relics of the two Hawaii saints.
