Rosanne K. Goo’s great-grandmother was a victim of Hansen’s disease and exiled to the leprosy settlement in Kalaupapa, Molokai, in 1889.

Fortunately, Goo said, it was a year after Mother Marianne Cope and six St. Francis sisters arrived at the isolated peninsula and vastly improved deplorable conditions. Cope, declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 2012, gave Goo’s great-grandmother “hope and a reason to live,” she said.

Appalled at the recent decision to move 24 sisters out of their longtime home, a convent situated near Saint Francis School in Manoa, Goo is appealing to Pope Francis for help.

Leadership of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities, based in Syracuse, N.Y., announced earlier this month that the retired nuns would be relocated to The Plaza at Pearl City, an assisted-living facility, in March as the convent, first built in the 1930s and rebuilt in the 1960s, is too large for the number of residents.

“How can they do this to these ladies, knowing the history of the place and their order (St. Francis) and the way they served? It breaks my heart,” Goo said. “We’re all connected. The patients, the sisters, the families of the patients — it affects all of us.”

Goo, who has two other relatives who contracted Hansen’s disease, said “the Kalaupapa patients are so attached to the sisters. I know they are watching this and they’re heartbroken.” Two St. Francis nuns still care for about 10 patients in Kalaupapa.

On Thursday Goo sent a letter to Pope Francis, hoping his compassion for the world’s underprivileged would move him to intervene on behalf of the nuns. In the letter, she wrote about her great-grandmother Ella Bridges Kaai, who was sent to Kalaupapa as a frightened child, and how Cope and her sisters nurtured and “helped her grow into the woman she became.”

“We (Kaai’s descendants) are all living proof of the good the Sisters have done,” Goo wrote. “The lives of the patients and sisters (are) forever intertwined.”

Goo said Cope and the religious order are part of a “huge and tremendous legacy, and it’s more valuable than money.”