The Sisters of St Francis in Syracuse have not yet received final approval from the Holy See for their congregation, but their Mother Superior has already been identified as a model for the faithful and an example for all believers around the world.
Indeed, America’s Mother Teresa is going to be made a saint.
The Vatican has verified the second miracle necessary to canonise the Blessed Marianne Cope, formerly Barbara Kobb, the Franciscan nun who in the 19th and 20th centuries (starting with her mission in Hawaii) created a “multinational” to help the sick and poor.
She is a well-known and highly respected figure for many, including US president Obama who was raised in Hawaii by his maternal grandparents.
After the miracle required to receive beatification, a second miracle was necessary for her canonisation. Now Heaven’s final seal of approval has arrived.
“America’s Mother Teresa” was born on 23 January 1838 in Heppenheim, Germany. Her father, Peter Kobb, and her mother, Barbara Witzenbacher, lived on their meagre earnings as farmers. In 1840 when their daughter was two years old, the family emigrated to the United States, settling in the city of Utica in the state of New York. Once her father was granted US citizenship, he changed the family’s surname from Kobb to Cope.
As a teenager, she started working in a factory to help her family get on, a family which had grown to include another three siblings while her father had become an invalid. While attending the parish school of St Joseph in Utica, she was able to take her First Communion in 1848 and in this environment her religious vocation flourished. She was forced to delay following her vocation because the financial situation of her family did not allow her to leave home.
Only when she was 24 was she able to follow her dream, and she entered the Institute of the Sisters of the Third Order of St Francis in Syracuse where after her novitiate she was invested with the name of Marianne.
She devoted herself to the apostolic life of the congregation, which among other things involved teaching the children of German immigrants. She learnt her parents’ mother tongue and she was asked to run a new, specially-created school.
Thanks to her intelligence and her generous dedication, she carried out sensitive roles in her congregation, including caring for the poor, who were dear to her, in the two hospitals of St Elizabeth’s in Utica and St Joseph’s in Syracuse (1869). In 1877 she was elected Provincial Mother and she was unanimously re-elected in 1881.
During this period, in 1883, she received a request from the bishop of Honolulu, who had passed the sisters a petition from the King of the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific Ocean (which at that time were independent and which in August 1959 became the 50th state of the USA), asking for nurses for the abandoned lepers of the kingdom. The situation was critical, 50 religious communities had already refused the royal petition.
Father Damien de Veuster (1840-1889), beatified in 1995, had chosen to live in those precarious conditions, however he had made it known that he would need nuns because the sick separated from their families and their villages were taken to the unhappy island of Molokai where there were neither proper buildings nor any health care.
It was necessary to build a hospital, and most of all, to set up a thorough programme of general hygiene, especially for the youngest children of patients with leprosy – who had followed their mothers – and undertake their education. Mother Marianne chose six nuns out of the 25 who volunteered and left with them to found the Mission of Sisters of the Third Order of St Francis in Hawaii; first she accompanied them to Honolulu and then to Molokai.
They worked with the local government to build hospitals on different islands in the archipelago. Father Damien de Veuster was diagnosed with leprosy in 1884 and died of the disease in 1889, and was cared for by the nuns until his death.
Mother Marianne became responsible for all administrative decisions, and she was forced to resign as Provincial Mother and remain in Molokai in order to save the mission for various reasons, including the fact that the other nuns threatened to go back to the United States with her. She never returned to the USA, and stayed to care for lepers for almost 30 years until her death.