ROME >> Hawaii embraced its second saint today — Marianne Cope, the patron saint of outcasts — for her work on Oahu, Maui and Molokai’s remote Kalaupapa Peninsula, where she eased the suffering of island people once shunned as "lepers."

Cope was canonized today along with six other venerated Catholics — including an American Indian — at a lavish ceremony before Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square.

Under bright skies, bells started ringing wildly in the square at 9:20 a.m. Rome time, or 9:20 p.m. Saturday Hawaii time, followed by a procession of bishops and priests past waiting cardinals, with the pope appearing at 9:40, aided by two attendants.

As the pope intoned in Latin, sainthood came for Cope and the others at 9:54. Her relic was presented at the altar just before 10.

In his homily during the mass, Benedict gave a brief history of all the new saints. In his remarks on Cope, he started with her birth in 1838 in Germany, and spoke of her work in Syracuse with the Franciscan order, but mostly concentrated on her service in Hawaii.

"Mother Marianne willingly embraced a call to care for the lepers of Hawaii after many others had refused," the pope said in English.

She "bravely" went to Kalaupapa to care for a dying Father Damien, "effectively ending her contact with the outside world," he said.

"At a time when little could be done for this suffering from this terrible disease, Marianne Cope showed the highest love, courage and enthusiasm. She is a shining and energetic example of the best of the tradition of Catholic nursing sisters and the spirit of her beloved St. Francis," the pontiff said.

Cope’s ascension to sainthood "means that she will continue to inspire us to do what she did — to follow the teachings of Jesus and express that love to those in need, wherever they may be, in any particular situation," said Honolulu Bishop Larry Silva, who led the Hawaii pilgrimage to Rome for today’s culmination of a decades-long effort to bestow the Sisters of St. Francis nun with the church’s highest honor.

The canonization included the presentation of "relics" from each saint to Benedict.

Sharon Smith was selected to carry one of the bone fragments exhumed from Cope’s original grave site in 2005 at Kalaupapa’s Bishop Home. Cope died in 1918 of kidney and heart disease at age 80.

Smith had been wasting away with pancreatitis in 2005 in a Syracuse, N.Y., hospital founded by Cope. A stranger named Sister Michaeleen Cabral pinned a packet of soil from Cope’s Kalaupapa grave to Smith’s hospital gown and began praying for a miracle.

Smith eventually recovered, and last year the Vatican declared it the second miracle needed to elevate Cope to sainthood. A 1992 miracle attributed to prayers to Cope on behalf of Kate Mahoney, a 14-year-old New York girl who was suffering from ovarian cancer, led to Cope’s beatification — one step below sainthood — in 2005.

Nine Hansen’s disease patients who have made the nearly 10,000-mile pilgrimage from Kalaupapa to Syracuse to Romejoined more than 200 other island residents — and tens of thousands of others crammed into St. Peter’s Square — to witness today’s canonization.

One of the patients, Pauline Chow, was to receive Communion today from the pope after Chow’s name was picked from a hat containing the names of the other patients.

After Benedict’s custom-made, white Mercedes Popemobile drove just a few feet past Chow and the other patients last week during a papal audience in St. Peter’s Square, Chow told the Star-Advertiser that she was "very appreciative" of the chance to receive Communion directly from the pontiff.

Rather than follow the custom of including the canonization midway through the service, the first half-hour or so focused just on the seven people being elevated to sainthood.

Cope joins Hawaii’s first saint, St. Damien de Veuster, who was canonized in 2009 for his work in Kalaupapa, where he built homes, engineered a water system and turned the remote peninsula into a community based on religious compassion.

Although Damien preceded Cope in Kalaupapa, she already was a 45-year-old accomplished nurse, mother superior and hospital administrator who left Syracuse and Utica, N.Y., to travel across a continent and an ocean with six other nuns. Cope had answered a call from Queen Kapiolani and King Kalakaua in 1883 for nuns to take over Hawaii hospitals and schools.

They arrived in Honolulu aboard the SS Mariposa on Nov. 8, 1883, according to the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities, who have been documenting and pushing Cope’s cause for canonization for more than 40 years.

"She left her family. She left everything to come to Hawaii," said Sister Alicia Damien Lau, a retired health care systems consultant from Manoa who was inspired by Cope’s work and traveled with Hansen’s disease patients to Rome. "She said to King Kalakaua, ‘I come with nothing but I hold your people in my heart.’"

Cope spent her first five years on Oahu, cleaning up the Kakaako Branch Hospital, which was doing little to ease the suffering of lepers, known today as Hansen’s disease patients, Downes said.

The hospital administrator at the time allowed abuse of the patients "and had a bunch of goons that ran the place," Downes said. "Marianne essentially cleaned up this filthy hospital that no one wanted to touch because of leprosy."

With no one caring for the healthy children of Hansen’s disease patients, Cope went on to found the Kapiolani Home for Girls orphanage, and then Malulani Hospital, Maui’s first general hospital.

In 1884, Cope met Father Damien on Oahu during the dedication of a chapel at a hospital she was to administer.

Two years later Damien himself was diagnosed with Hansen’s disease.

But Hawaii officials initially refused to let Cope go to Kalaupapa.

"Others thought it was not a place for a woman to live," Downes said. "But she was very advanced when it came to medical practices and knew the value of hygiene when others did not."

While Cope’s work in Syracuse, Utica, Kakaako, Maui and Kalaupapa was focused in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, her elevation to sainthood provides modern lessons to Christians on how they should lead their lives, Downes said.

"The light has to be shown on these heroic examples of Christianity," Downes said. "That’s the whole point of canonization. We have to keep reminding ourselves of these saints. Otherwise, we fall into our old habits and tend to forget what needs to be done."

For everyday people, Bishop Silva said, the lesson of Cope’s life "is not what you do, but how you do it — with Christ in your heart — and not being afraid to meet challenges."

In the weeks ahead, Catholics will prepare to celebrate the new, worldwide St. Marianne Cope Day on Jan. 23, the 175th anniversary of her birth.

Among her many noble accomplishments, Silva said, part of Cope’s legacy will be to "perpetuate the story of Kalaupapa … for the whole world."