A sainted nun blessed Hawaii with her service

To isle Catholics, the importance of conferring the status of sainthood is clear, evidenced by the excitement over the impending canonization on Sunday of Mother Marianne Cope, the Franciscan nun who dedicated her life to the care of Hansen’s disease patients on Molokai. The ceremony will be for them worth celebrating because one of Hawaii’s own is acknowledged as having demonstrated the ultimate fulfillment of her faith.

But it is an occasion everyone can respect, regardless of religious belief, which is what makes Hawaii’s two saints special. What the believer calls holiness also can be seen as service to humanity at the highest level, service that has left an indelible mark on the well-being of this state.

It’s only been three years since the "leper priest" who ministered to the same patients, St. Damien of Molokai, was elevated in his own canonization rite in Rome. Cope, born in Germany as Maria Anna Barbara Koob, moved as an infant with her parents to New York, where the surname was Americanized. Life was hard, and her father’s illness forced her, as the eldest child, to do factory work and help support the family.

She entered the religious life when the children were grown, becoming an educator and soon rising through the ranks of her congregation to become superior general. Among her contributions was starting the first public hospital in Syracuse, N.Y.

After 13 years in hospital administration, she received word of a plea from King Kalakaua to help with the care of Hansen’s disease sufferers in Hawaii. Cope volunteered for the mission, along with six other sisters.

What’s abundantly clear by all the histories on Mother Marianne is that she wholeheartedly embraced the mission and the people who had been dehumanized by the degenerative infectious disease. Banished to the Kalaupapa settlement on Molokai, before the arrival of Damien and the Franciscan sisters, these were people who desperately needed that embrace.

Unlike St. Damien, Mother Marianne did not contract the disease. That’s despite her close contact with all the residents and especially with the colony’s priest, whom she nursed as he succumbed to his illness.

The work continued after Damien’s death. After running Kalaupapa schools and a women’s and girls’ home, she died in 1918 of natural causes and was buried at that home.

Mother Marianne’s legacy, and that of the Franciscan Sisters in Hawaii, was to create the foundation of what remained a critical part of Hawaii’s health care system for decades. St. Francis Hospital was founded in her memory, followed by other Franciscan health institutions. Saint Francis School, too, was founded in her honor.

Throughout the pilgrimage of the Hawaii contingent to Rome, Blessed Marianne Cope (the title given after her beatification in 2005) has been extolled as a "holy woman." An intrinsic part of that distinction, however, is just how human she was, and how she nurtured the humanity of all people, even those society had discarded.

That can be recognized by all, as can this observation: Hawaii, with its endowment of health care services and its value for human kindness, would have been a far poorer place without Mother Marianne.