Saint Marianne Cope (+1918), whose memorial is on this January 23rd, was an American-born Sister of the Third Order of Saint Francis, who spent much of her apostolate working amongst the lepers in Hawaii. She was contemporaneous with Father Damien de Veuster (1840 – 1848), the ‘leper priest’, whom she tended on his deathbed.
Born Barbara Koob on this day in Germany in 1838, at Heppenheim, her family immigrated the next year to Utica, New York, anglicizing their name to ‘Cope’. When her father took ill, Marianne, in eighth grade, supported the family by working in a textile factory – not easy back then, before the labour laws we take for granted. It was only when her siblings had grown up that she followed her religious vocation, taking the name Marianne. For the first years, she taught, mainly German immigrants, before moving into health care, helping to set up the first two public hospitals in New York, offering care without regard for race or creed – again, a novelty in those days.
It was in 1883 that the plea came from the King of Hawaii, Kalakaua (it would not become a U.S. state until 1959) for help with the lepers on the island nation. The disease was then seen as highly contagious, so most demurred, but Sister Marianne did not hesitate:
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.’
I am not afraid of any disease. This is the response of the saints, a lesson the Church seems to have forgotten of late.
Sister Marianne arrived on the island with six others, on November 8th, 1884, and she never left, spending the rest of her life caring for the lepers, often left abandoned and bereft. She improved their condition immensely, confronting the corrupt administrator – it was she or him who had to go – fearless against all obstacles. She eventually moved to the remote peninsula where the patients with the worse cases were exiled, knowing she could never thereby return to America. Inspiring others, she received help from benefactors, and was honoured for her work, by both the Church and the state.
Unlike Father Damian, Sister Marianne never caught the disease, and died of natural causes on August 8th, 1918, just after the outbreak of the First World War, about which she likely knew nothing in those halcyonic pre-internet days.
We owe the Marianne Copes of the world a great debt of gratitude, for it was to consecrated women such as she that we owe our hospitals, schools and many other apostolates, now, sadly, too often usurped by others who share neither their faith nor their goodness.
Sister Marianne Cope was beatified by Benedict XVI on May 14, 2005, by decree of Pope Benedict XVI, and canonized by the same Pope on December 19, 2011. She was his first beatification, and his last canonization, before his own resignation in 2013. May the good Sister, now in beatitude, intercede for our beleaguered Church, and may all keep our focus on the work before us, in doing God’s holy and perfect will, without fear, and without compromise.
(source, in parte: wikipedia.org)