St. Marianne of Molokai (Photo illustration by Louise Lutz)
The Molokai saint’s death a century ago was met with an outpouring of acclaim for her selfless devotion to the Hawaiian people
By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
The death of St. Marianne of Molokai on Aug. 9 100 years ago was met with outpourings of sorrow and acclaim for her selfless devotion to the Hawaiian people.
The “heroine” nun went to her heavenly reward peacefully in her convent bed in Kalaupapa, as her fellow Franciscan sisters prayed quietly around her. She was 80 and a Sister of St. Francis for 56 years. She had served Hawaii’s suffering Hansen’s disease patients for 35 years.
In reporting her death the next day, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin described Mother Marianne as “one of the best known and best loved Catholic Sisters in the islands.”
The Aug. 11, 1918, Honolulu Advertiser wrote, “Throughout the Islands, the memory of Mother Marianne is revered, particularly among the Hawaiians in whose cause she was shown such martyr-like devotion. Those who have met the sweet delicate little woman, whose face was almost spirituelle, have always been impressed with her intellectual qualities, for she was a woman of splendid accomplishments, and had fine executive ability. She impressed everyone as a real ‘mother’ to those who stood so sorely in need of ‘mothering.’”
The Advertiser quoted Mrs. J.F. Bowler, a leading Catholic laywoman at the time, who said Mother Marianne “risked her own life … faced everything with unflinching courage and smiled sweetly throughout it all. … She was a heroine in her life; she is a martyr in death.”
In the Aug. 18 Post-Standard newspaper of Syracuse, N.Y., the city from which St. Marianne had come, Fred D. Dutcher predicted: “When the role of the saints is called, Mother Marianne will be there to answer, ‘Here.’” Her name “will live as that of a woman whose noble self-sacrifice ranks with the death-defying devotion of the martyrs of old.”
Mother Marianne died of natural causes, of old age, weakened by the rigors of her work.
Mother Marianne Cope, in her wheelchair, gathers with her fellow Franciscan Sisters and patients of Bishop Home in Kalaupapa for a photo taken on Aug. 1, 1918, less than two weeks before her death. (HCH file photo)
Her final decline
Her biography, “Pilgrimage and Exile,” by Franciscan Sister Mary Laurence Hanley and historian O.A. Bushnell, describes the decline of her final years.
“Her body, so overworked for God’s sake, so generously offered to Lady Poverty’s rule, so relentlessly chastened at humility’s orders, broke at last. Her heart and kidneys began to fail more than three years before she died. Like St. Francis, — who neglected his body with even fiercer distain — she, too, suffered from dropsy.”
Dropsy is an old term for edema, the swelling of the body’s tissues from the accumulation of excess water.
At this point, Mother Marianne needed a wheelchair.
Mother Marianne, not one to pose for pictures, agreed to have her photo taken by Sister Albina Sluder, on Aug. 1, 1918, eight days before she died.
“Pilgrimage and Exile” describes the photographs taken that day.
“They are studies in deterioration, causes for sorrow. Time has laid grievous marks upon Mother Marianne and upon all the sisters. Mother, bent and broken, sits sagging in a corner of the wheel chair. Her face is bloated, with huge pouches under the eyes and jowls hanging heavy upon the white collar of her habit. The hands are mottled, gnarled, misshapen. Age and illness have disfigured her, as if she too had caught the leprosy. In this saddening ruin can be found no trace of the beauty that once distinguished her.”
“In these portraits of feeble mortality,” the biography ponders, “we can suspect, lies the meaning behind Mother Marianne’s willingness to sit for Sister Albina’s recording camera. ‘Look upon me and learn,’ she is saying. ‘This, too, is God’s will.’”
Days after the photo was taken, knowing the end was soon, Franciscan Sisters from Maui and Honolulu came to Kalaupapa to be by Mother Marianne’s side.
Ready for breakfast
Saint Marianne’s final day started with the sisters getting up at their usual 4 a.m. But at 4:30 Mother Marianne asked all the sisters to gather. Father Andre Maxime was called to administer the last rites.
Later, after the sisters had returned from morning Mass, they were surprised to find Mother Marianne dressed, in her wheelchair, ready for breakfast.
She also came to lunch, and to dinner, but could not eat those meals, and as Sister Leopoldina Burns wrote in her journal, “seemed too weak to talk.”
After dinner she asked to be taken out to the veranda, a favorite place of hers, “just for a little while.”
The original gravesite of St. Marianne of Molokai at Bishop Home in Kalaupapa is marked by a statue of St. Francis embraced by the crucified Jesus. (HCH file photo)
“When we reached the veranda,” Sister Leopoldina recalled, “with an effort she raised her hand as if in blessing and then it dropped heavily in her lap.”
A little girl passing by saw Mother Marianne and began to cry. The nun tried to wave, but her hand “dropped helplessly in her lap.”
She then asked to be taken to her room where her sisters were waiting for her.
Sister Leopoldina describes the rest. “About 10 o’clock, knowing Mother was about to leave us we were all kneeling in her room. Mother looked so peaceful, her full red lips turned purple, her eyes and mouth were closed, and they never opened again, not a muscle in her face moved and her breathing so easy one could scarcely know she was living only for the slight movement of her hand when we would stop praying.”
Then, a little after 11 p.m., with “a slight movement of her shoulders … she was gone.”
The next day, Mother Marianne’s body was placed in a “beautifully varnished” coffin made ahead of time by “Charlie,” the settlement’s coffin-maker. It was carried in procession to the nearby St. Francis Church for services before being brought back to the Bishop Home property to be laid to rest at 4 p.m. while patients and residents gathered around her grave praying and singing.
Silver voices
On Sept. 9, 1918, a month after her death, Sacred Hearts Bishop Libert Boeynaems celebrated a solemn requiem Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace.
At the Mass, the Honolulu Advertiser reported “a great throng of worshippers confined not only to Catholics, but many of other faiths, for Mother Marianne numbered her friends throughout Hawaii by hundreds.”
Singing at the Mass was a choir of children from Kapiolani Home, a Honolulu residence for the children of Hansen’s disease patients that Mother Marianne had founded. Their “silvery voices rose bell-like in beautiful chants,” the Star-Bulletin said.
The newspaper also noted “that the ‘kamaainas’ especially mourn the loss of this nun was shown by the presence of Governor McCarthy, ex-Governor Pinkham, W.R. Castle, Capt. A.L.C. Atkinson and many other prominent Honoluluans.”
St. Marianne was the only Franciscan Sister to be buried in Kalaupapa. Her gravesite sits in the shade of several large trees. Soon after her death, Kalaupapa residents erected a monument for her, a nearly life-size sculpture of the crucified Christ reaching down to embrace St. Francis of Assisi.
St. Marianne Cope was born Barbara Koob on Jan. 23, 1838, in Hessen, West Germany. A year after she was born, the family immigrated to Utica, N.Y., where the surname Koob became Cope. Barbara became a U.S. citizen when her father was naturalized.
She joined the Sisters of St. Francis in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1862 taking the religious name Marianne.
As a young sister, she was a teacher and principal in several New York schools. Later, as a member of the Franciscan Sisters’ governing board, she helped establish two of central New York’s first hospitals: St. Elizabeth’s in Utica in 1866 and St. Joseph’s in Syracuse in 1869.
She was the superior of her order when, in 1883, she answered a request from the Hawaiian government for religious nursing sisters to care for leprosy patients. “I am not afraid of any disease,” she said, volunteering for the mission. She and six sister companions arrived in Hawaii on Nov. 8, 1883.
On Oahu, Mother Marianne was given full control of the Kakaako Branch Hospital for leprosy patients. In 1884, she opened Malulani Hospital, Maui’s first general hospital. In November 1885, she established Kapiolani Home for the female children of leprosy patients.
Two years after she arrived in the Islands, Mother Marianne was honored by King Kalakaua with the medal of the Royal Order of Kapiolani for her acts of benevolence.
Move to Kalaupapa
In 1887, the government closed the Kakaako hospital, sending leprosy patients directly to Kalaupapa. Mother Marianne extended her mission to that Molokai settlement knowing it jeopardized her chance of ever returning to Syracuse.
“We will cheerfully accept the work,” she said.
Arriving at Kalaupapa with two youthful assistants several months before Damien’s death, Mother Marianne assured the ailing priest that she would care for his patients at the settlement’s boys’ home.
She eventually settled into caring for Kalaupapa’s women and girls at Bishop Home, a collection of cottage residences surrounding the sister’s convent.
Mother Marianne’s treatment of patients was far ahead of its time. She encouraged their education and social growth, irrespective of the fact that they were all dying of a fatal disease.
The author Robert Louis Stevenson, in a visit to Kalaupapa in 1889, praised Mother Marianne and her sisters in verse, describing their presence as “beauty springing from the breast of pain.”
Pope John Paul II declared Mother Marianne “venerable” in 2004. Pope Benedict XVI beatified her on May 14, 2005, with Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins presiding over the ceremony in the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica.
Pope Benedict XVI canonized Blessed Marianne in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on Oct. 21, 2012.
St. Marianne’s remains had been exhumed in 2005, a requirement for canonization. They were taken to be enshrined at the Franciscan motherhouse in Syracuse where she got her start in religious life, and where the hub of her religious order — now called the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities — operates.
When the motherhouse closed in 2014, her remains, a collection of bones sealed in a 48-by-20-by-12 inch metal box, were returned to Hawaii and are now kept in the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace.
Her final destination will be a reliquary chapel she will share with a relic of St. Damien of Molokai, to be built as an addition to the cathedral as part of the church’s ongoing renovation.
Mass for the centenary of the death of St. Marianne Cope
- Celebrant: Bishop Larry Silva
- 6 p.m.
- Thursday, Aug. 9
- The Almeida Center
- Saint Francis School
- 2707 Pamoa Road, Honolulu
- Refreshments to follow
- If you plan to stay for refreshments, kindly RSVP by July 31 to Sister William Marie Eleniki, 382-2600
- Sponsors: Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities
