A banner showing St. Marianne Cope hangs from the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica for the canonization Mass for seven new saints led by Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican Oct. 21, 2012. (CNS photo/Paul Haring )
By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
Ten years ago, on Oct. 21, under glorious blue skies, Pope Benedict XVI canonized Mother Marianne Cope in the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square, giving Hawaii its second saint in three years.
The Diocese of Honolulu will celebrate the anniversary with a Mass in the Co-Cathedral of St. Theresa on Oct. 25 at 7 p.m. Bishop Larry Silva will preside. All are invited.
The bishop will also celebrate an anniversary Mass Oct. 23 at 10 a.m. at St. Francis Church, Kalaupapa, Molokai.
The canonization brought honor to the 8,000 men, women and children — almost all native Hawaiians — who died in banishment in Kalaupapa, a five-square-mile leaf of land protruding from the base of Molokai’s northern sea cliffs, only for the misfortune of contracting Hansen’s disease.
St. Marianne’s Kalaupapa predecessor, St. Damien de Veuster, was canonized Oct. 11, 2009.
On Oct. 21, 2012, before a crowd of tens of thousands, Pope Benedict also raised six others to the ranks of sainthood including the first North American native, a Filipino teenager, a German mystic, two European priests and a Spanish woman who founded a religious order.
Six hundred were there for St. Marianne, a Sister of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities from Syracuse, N.Y, including nine patients from Kalaupapa.
A pilgrim holds a sign with the word “Molokai” as pilgrims wait to enter the canonization Mass for seven new saints in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican Oct. 21, 2012. Among the new saints declared by Pope Benedict XVI were two North Americans — St. Kateri Tekakwitha, an American Indian born in upstate New York who died in Canada in 1680, and St. Marianne Cope, who worked with leprosy patients on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
St. Marianne Cope, at age 45, said goodbye to her home in Syracuse, her family, her friends, her country, her job as a modern hospital administrator and her position as superior of her religious order to care for the shunned victims of a fatal disease in a tiny island kingdom in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Starting with six companion sisters, she worked first for five years on Oahu, transforming a filth-ridden dump that dared to call itself a hospital, into a place of decency that included a home for girls orphaned by the disease. She also opened a general hospital on Maui.
In 1888, five months before St. Damien died, she went to Kalaupapa. For the next 30 years, in self-imposed exile, she ran the government’s home for women and girls, bringing dignity, grace and beauty to both the place and the lives consigned there.
“The charity of the good knows no creed and is confined to no one place,” she said. Her sisters today continue a robust healthcare mission in Hawaii.
St. Marianne died at age 80 in 1918 and was buried in Kalaupapa. Never having left Hawaii in life, she returned to Syracuse in death, in 2005, when her remains were exhumed and sent to be enshrined at the motherhouse she had left 122 years earlier. They were later interred in Honolulu’s Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace.
