Saint Marianne Cope

Virgin

Feast Day

January 23

Life

1838–1918

Canonized

2012

Order

Sisters of the Third Order of Saint Francis of Syracuse, New York

Born

Heppenheim, Grand Duchy of Hesse (Germany)

Barbara Koob (later Cope) was born January 23, 1838, in Heppenheim in the Grand Duchy of Hesse and emigrated as an infant with her family to Utica, New York, where she grew up in a German Catholic immigrant parish. After her father's illness she worked many years in a textile factory to support her family. In 1862 she entered the Sisters of the Third Order of Saint Francis at Syracuse, New York, and took the religious name Marianne.

Within her congregation she helped found two of the first general public Catholic hospitals in the United States, at Utica and Syracuse, on a model open to patients regardless of religion or background. She served as superior of Saint Joseph's Hospital, Syracuse, and was elected provincial superior (Mother Superior) of her congregation in 1877 and reelected in 1881.

In 1883 she received an appeal from the Bishop of Honolulu for sisters to staff hospitals for those with leprosy in Hawaii. After many other religious institutes had refused, Mother Marianne accepted, sailed with six sisters, and never returned to the mainland. They first staffed the hospital at Kakaako on Oahu, then in 1888 went to Kalaupapa on the island of Molokai at the request of Saint Damien de Veuster, who was already dying of leprosy.

For the remaining thirty years of her life she organized care for women and girls at Kalaupapa, supported Father Damien in his last illness, and after his death in 1889 took over the care of the boys and men he had served. She died at Kalaupapa on August 9, 1918, never having contracted the disease.

She was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on May 14, 2005, and canonized by him in Saint Peter's Square on October 21, 2012. In his canonization homily Benedict said that Marianne "willingly embraced a call to care for the lepers of Hawaii after many others had refused," and that her example showed how Christ becomes present to the marginalized.