Sister of St. Francis William Marie Eleniki presents St. Marianne’s Hawaiian medal to the bishop Jan. 23 in the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace. (Photo courtesy of Dann Ebina)
By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
Borrowing from the brief Gospel passage from Mark in which people around Jesus, alarmed by his actions, were saying, “He is out of his mind,” Bishop Larry Silva said that St. Marianne of Molokai must also have been considered a little crazy.
This observation was the key point of his homily at the noon Mass for the “Beloved Mother of Outcasts” on her birthday feast day Jan. 23 at the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace.
“Sometimes when we do something the Lord wants us to do, we risk being called out of our mind,” he said.
“There is a certain craziness in following Jesus Christ and thank God that there is,” because if Mother Marianne had weighed all the contingencies and did the sensible thing, she would never have done what she did, he said.
“In the end, she said, ‘We are going to do this. It may seem like an insane mission, but Christ is present in everyone, even the outcast,’” the bishop said.
“We pray that we will follow in her footsteps and more toward sainthood ourselves,” he said. “In the end we trust that it is God who will accomplish the work.”
About 50 people attended the Mass. Roughly a third were members of St. Marianne’s congregation, the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities.
That was about all pandemic social distancing would allow on the main floor of the downtown church.
The Sisters of St. Francis used the occasion to present to the bishop the saint’s Knights Grand Cross, a Hawaiian honorary medal she received posthumously a year ago from the Order of Kamehameha I.
St. Marianne Cope’s royal Hawaiian honor is displayed by her relic. (Photo courtesy of Sister Malia Dominica Wong, OP)
The medal — a white enamel Maltese cross set on a gold sunburst with an ornate “K” in the center, mounted in a rectangular wooden box with a hinged cover — will be permanently displayed inside the saint’s reliquary in the cathedral basilica.
At least two other noteworthy Catholics received the Knights Grand Cross: Bishop Louis Maigret, the second bishop of the Hawaii mission, in 1881, and St. Damien posthumously in 2019.
A representative of the Order of Kamehameha first presented St. Marianne’s medal to the superior of the Sisters of St. Francis, Sister Barbara Jean Donovan, and Sister of St. Francis Alicia Damien Lau in Honolulu on Jan. 18, 2020.
“On behalf of the legacy of Kamehameha V and the Order of Kamehameha I, it is an honor and pleasure to award the Knights Grand Cross to St. Marianne Cope, the beloved mother of outcasts, who cared for Hawaii’s leprosy patients for 35 years, the final 30 years in Kalaupapa, Molokai,” the order said in a statement at the time.
St. Marianne came to Hawaii in 1883. She died in Kalaupapa in 1918 and was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.
At the end of Mass, the bishop, wearing a chasuble with images of St. Damien and St. Marianne down the front and back, blessed the people with a relic of the saint, a glass-encased bone fragment imbedded in a wooden Franciscan Tau cross.
