Marianne Cope

Marianne Cope was born Barbara Koob on 23 January 1838 in Heppenheim, in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, to Peter Koob and Barbara Witzenbacher Koob. In 1839 the family emigrated to the United States and settled in Utica, New York, where their surname was later anglicized to Cope. As the eldest daughter she left school after the eighth grade and worked for years in a factory so that she could help support the household after her father became an invalid. She felt a vocation to religious life from childhood but delayed entering a convent until her younger siblings were old enough to manage without her wages.

In 1862 she entered the Sisters of the Third Order Regular of Saint Francis in Syracuse, New York, and received the religious name Marianne. She taught in parish schools of the Diocese of Syracuse and served as a school principal. In 1869 she helped establish St. Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse, among the first public hospitals in central New York, and later served as its administrator. She required that patients be received without discrimination as to nationality, race, or religion, and she insisted on high standards of cleanliness and nursing care. She was elected provincial superior of her congregation, the office she held when the appeal from Hawaii arrived.

In 1883 King Kalākaua and the Hawaiian government asked Catholic sisters in the United States to take charge of hospitals and homes for people afflicted with Hansen’s disease, then commonly called leprosy. More than fifty religious institutes declined. Mother Marianne accepted the mission and sailed with six sisters to Honolulu. They took over the Kakaʻako Branch Hospital, a receiving facility for patients destined for isolation, and she founded the Kapiʻolani Home for the healthy daughters of patients so that the girls would not be left destitute. In November 1888 she went to the remote peninsula of Kalaupapa on Molokaʻi to administer the Bishop Home for women and girls, arriving as Father Damien de Veuster was in the last months of his life. She remained at Kalaupapa for thirty years, introducing sanitation, schooling, music, needlework, and a spirit of family among people who had been legally banished from the rest of Hawaiian society. She assured her sisters that they would not contract the disease if they followed the precautions she laid down; none of them did.

Mother Marianne died of natural causes at Kalaupapa on 9 August 1918. She was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on 14 May 2005 after the Holy See recognized a medically unexplained recovery attributed to her intercession, and she was canonized by the same pope on 21 October 2012 after a second such recovery was accepted. Originally buried on the grounds of the Bishop Home, her remains were transferred in 2005 to the motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Francis in Syracuse, New York; relics have also been enshrined at the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Honolulu. She is honored as a witness to steadfast care for the sick and the socially excluded.