Mother Marianne Cope
(1838 – 1918)
Mother Marianne Cope
Photo: Wikipedia
Mother Marianne Cope was a pioneering advocate for patient rights, sanitation and hygiene and dedicated her life to the sick without distinction of nationality, religion, color, or character. Her life’s work took her across the world to care for Hawai‘i’s outcast people afflicted with leprosy.
Early Life and Family
A religious sister of the Third Order of St. Francis, the German-born American was born on January 23, 1838, and baptized as Barbara Koob. Her family emigrated to Utica, New York in 1839. From the age of 14, and for the next nine years, Cope supported her family by working in a factory. When her younger siblings became old enough to provide for the household, she followed her lifelong wish to enter the convent and became known as Sister Marianne.
First a teacher, then an administrator, Cope finally found her calling in healthcare. In 1866, she helped found two hospitals in New York that were among the first 50 hospitals in the United States. While serving as mother general for a congregation of the Sisters of St. Francis (with a reputation for treating “outcast” patients), she responded to an appeal from King Kalākaua and Queen Kapi‘olani to take charge of the kingdom’s hospitals: “Have pity on our poor sick, help us.”
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Saint Marianne of Molokaʻi
At a time when leprosy frightened most people Cope replied to the monarchs: “I am hungry for the work and I wish with all my heart to be one of the chosen ones, whose privilege it will be, to sacrifice themselves for the salvation of the souls of the poor Islanders … I am not afraid of any disease, hence it would be my greatest delight even to minister to the abandoned ‘lepers.’”
Cope (second from right) and the Sisters of St. Francis, at the Kakaʻako Branch Hospital in 1886
Photo: Wikipedia
On the morning of October 22, 1883, Cope and six other Sisters of St. Francis traveled from Syracuse to San Francisco where they departed on the SS Mariposa for Honolulu, arriving weeks later on November 8. Within four years Cope and her team transformed the Kaka‘ako Branch Hospital, which served as a receiving station, for those with leprosy from a dirty, overcrowded institution plagued by vermin into a hospital compound with beautiful grounds and cottages, where people were treated with dignity. During this time she also founded both Malulani Hospital (the first general hospital on Maui now called Maui Memorial Medical Center) and Kapi‘olani Home in Honolulu for the healthy female children of persons with leprosy.
In 1888, she arrived at the remote settlement on Moloka‘i’s Kalaupapa peninsula, a place adults and children with leprosy were exiled to. Her influence spread throughout Kalaupapa, transforming it from a place of abandonment and despair, to a community of hope and dignity.
SEE ALSO: Significant Women in Hawai‘i History
Mother Marianne Cope statue in Kewalo Basin Park
Photo: billsoPHOTO, Flickr via Wikipedia
Death and Afterlife
Cope, who died on August 9, 1918, was declared a saint by Pope Benedict XVI on October 21, 2012, making her the second person connected to Hawai‘i to be canonized by the Catholic Church. Hundreds of Hawai‘i pilgrims traveled thousands of miles for the canonisation of Saint Marianne at St Peter’s Square in Vatican City. In 2010, a statue of Cope was installed at Kewalo Basin Park. Inscribed on the plaque next to the bronze image (which faces in the direction of Moloka‘i) reads “This statue serves as an inspiration to never give up caring for those whom society has abandoned.” She now rests at Our Lady of Peace Cathedral in Downtown Honolulu.
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