St. Marianne Cope

Barbara Koob was born in 1838 in Heppenheim, a small town in the Grand Duchy of Hesse in what is now Germany. Her family emigrated to the United States when she was a young child, settling in Utica, New York, where her father worked as a laborer. The family later adopted the anglicized surname Cope. Growing up in a working-class immigrant household, Barbara received only a modest education and went to work in a textile mill as a teenager to help support her family. In her early twenties, she was drawn to religious life, though the deaths of her father and her sister's husband disrupted her plans. She eventually entered the Sisters of St. Francis in Syracuse, New York, in 1862, taking the name Sister Marianne. Over the following two decades she became a respected administrator, serving as a teacher and eventually as a hospital administrator. In 1883 she was elected Mother Provincial of her congregation, a position of significant responsibility. Mother Marianne's life took a decisive turn in 1883, when she received a plea from the Hawaiian government for sisters to help staff a hospital on Maui. Despite the well-known risks, she volunteered herself and a group of sisters. She later wrote, "I am not afraid of any disease," and the community supported the mission, with Bishop Koeckemann telling her to "make the best use of the few remaining years of my life." The sisters took over the Kakaupule Hospital in Wailuku and later the Malulani Hospital in Wailuku, which was largely devoted to the care of patients with Hansen's disease (then commonly called leprosy). When St. Damien de Veuster died in 1889 after years of ministering on the Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokai, Mother Marianne volunteered to continue his work. She and Sister Leopoldina Burns arrived on Molokai later that year and reorganized the Bishop Home for Girls and Women. She insisted on dignity, cleanliness, and medical care for the patients, and worked to improve the conditions of a settlement that had long been a place of exile and neglect. For more than 30 years she served there, alongside other sisters who joined her over the decades. Despite decades of intimate, hands-on care for people with Hansen's disease, Mother Marianne never contracted it herself. Whether or not one attributes this to divine protection, it remains a striking fact about her ministry. She died on August 9, 1918, at the Bishop Home in Kalaupapa, having spent her final years weakened by illness. Her remains were later returned to Syracuse, New York, where she is buried in the Franciscan cemetery. She was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2004 and canonized by him in 2012, alongside St. Damien de Veuster. Her feast day is January 23. She is remembered as a patron of lepers, outcasts, and Hawaii, and is often invoked against HIV/AIDS and other diseases that carry social stigma. Her witness continues to draw on the Communion of Saints: a quiet administrator who answered an urgent call and stayed.