Honolulu again will give an aloha welcome to Hawaii’s beloved saint who is returning for permanent rest
Mother Marianne Cope in a wheelchair poses for a photo with some of the women and Franciscan Sisters of Bishop Home, Kalaupapa, in 1918, shortly before her death.
St. Marianne Cope’s remains will return to Hawaii to be enshrined in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace nearly a decade after they were exhumed in Kalaupapa to rest at her motherhouse in Syracuse.
All that is left of the saint’s earthly body, now encased in a galvanized metal box, will reside permanently in the church that was her first point of welcome after disembarking at age 45 in Honolulu in 1883. This time her reception, which begins at 10:45 a.m. on July 31, will include prayers, songs, talks and a Mass.
In the cathedral, the metal box, at 48 by 20 by 12 inches, will be placed in an existing seven-foot high display case that now holds a small relic of the saint.
The remains, reduced to a small collection of bone fragments by the nun’s osteoporosis and 87 years under Molokai’s volcanic soil, were sealed in the box following their gentle unearthing in January of 2005 from her grave under the shade trees on the grounds of Bishop Home where the New York missionary lived the last 30 years of her life.
The remains are being transported from Syracuse in a casket, and will arrive in Hawaii by plane on July 27 accompanied by Sister Roberta Smith, general minister of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities, and Sister Geraldine Ching, assistant general minister. A small group led by Bishop Larry Silva will welcome the casket upon its arrival with a short private ceremony.
The remains will stay at the Franciscan Sisters’ convent in Manoa until the July 31 cathedral service.
Borthwick Mortuary will be handling the transport of the remains on Oahu.
The metal box is scheduled to arrive at the cathedral at 10:45 a.m. and be greeted by the bishop, the chancellor Deacon Walter Yoshimitsu and the diocesan promoter of justice Father Steve Nguyen who will first examine and verify the official seals on the box as required by canon law.
The container will then be carried into the church in a kahili-led procession to the sound of a Hawaiian prayer chant and placed on a low table in front of the altar. Prayers, reflections, hymns and veneration will fill the hour before the noon Mass, which Bishop Silva will celebrate.
After Mass, the box will be placed in the koa display cabinet and veneration will follow until evening prayers at 4:30 p.m.
First exhumed in 2005
Sister of St. Francis Mary Laurence Hanley places the bones of St. Marianne in the galvanized metal box at St. Elizabeth Convent at Bishop Home in Kalaupapa in January 2005. On the table to the right of the box is the Franciscan habit that also went in the box. (HCH file photo)
Mother Marianne’s remains were exhumed Jan. 22-27, 2005, by a volunteer five-member team of forensic anthropologists and technicians led by Kapolei resident Vincent J. Sava of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, Central Identification Laboratory.
The bones, after thorough examination, cleaning and detailed cataloguing, were put in several ziplock bags and placed in a covered cardboard “curation” box held centered in place in the metal container by four ordinary rolled up blankets.
A full Franciscan black and white religious habit of the kind St. Marianne would have worn was then placed on top of the contents. A fifth blanket was laid over the habit and the metal box was covered with a sheet of galvanized metal held in place by four screws. It was later completely soldered shut.
For the past nine years in Syracuse, in the St. Anthony Convent Chapel at the motherhouse on Court Street, the remains have been held in a large reliquary of ribbon mahogany, raised a few feet off the floor on two thick wooden pillars and decorated with carved plumeria flowers.
The Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities decided late last year to relocate the saint’s remains with the closing and moving of the motherhouse, the home of 75 sisters.
The financial demands resulting from the move was one of the reasons the community decided to bring the saint’s remains back to Hawaii, Sister Roberta said last December.
“It made sense to bring her home to the center of the community of sisters” during the canonization process, Sister Roberta 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.”
The remains will still belong to the Sisters of St. Francis.
Superior of her order
The reliquary in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace that will hold St. Marianne’s remains.
St. Marianne Cope was the superior of her upstate New York order, then called the Franciscan Sisters of Syracuse, when she arrived in Hawaii in 1883 with six companion sisters to care for natives with Hansen’s disease. Shortly afterward, she opened Malulani Hospital on Maui, today operating as Maui Memorial Medical Center, 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. From then and in the 125 years that followed, approximately 65 Sisters of St. Francis have served in Kalaupapa as nurses and health care workers.
St. Marianne died at age 80 in Kalaupapa in 1918 and was the only Sister of St. Francis to be buried there. She was beatified at the Vatican on May 14, 2005. Pope Benedict XVI canonized her a saint on Oct. 21, 2012.
The Sisters of St. Francis have since thrived in Hawaii in the health and educational fields and in the number of local vocations.
St. Marianne is one of only 12 so-called “American” saints, though some of them, like St. Damien, served in territories before they became part of the United States. St. Marianne is one of at least five who were U.S. citizens.
She is the only American saint whose remains will be enshrined in a cathedral, the mother church of a diocese. The others are buried or interred at national shrines and in chapels on convent grounds.
As part of the current $15 million renovation of the 173-year-old Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace, a small reliquary chapel eventually will be added on the mauka side of the church to house relics of St. Marianne and St. Damien, plus St. Marianne’s remains.
According to the liturgical consultant for the renovation of the cathedral, De La Salle Christian Brother William J. Woeger, the box holding the nun’s remains will be interred out of sight “in a crypt” beneath the floor of the reliquary chapel.
“There may be some engraved text on the floor,” said Brother Woeger, who is the director of the Office for Divine Worship for the Archdiocese of Omaha, Neb. “This is a work in progress.”
Cathedral rector Father John Berger said the reliquary chapel will be constructed toward the end of the restoration project which is expected to take several years.
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.
