Feast day: January 23

St. Marianne Cope

Virgin, Religious · 1838–1918

Patron of Lepers, outcasts

A German-American Franciscan sister who left a thriving hospital network to care for leprosy patients exiled to Molokai, where she served for thirty years.

Barbara Koob — later spelled Cope — was born in Germany in 1838 and brought as an infant to the United States, growing up in a German immigrant family in Utica, New York. She worked in a factory to support her family after her father fell ill, and only in her mid-twenties was she free to follow her call, entering the Sisters of St. Francis and taking the name Marianne.

She proved a gifted leader and a pioneer of Catholic health care in America. As a teacher, superior, and hospital administrator, she helped found some of the first general hospitals in the country — institutions notable for insisting on cleanliness and on the dignity of every patient, accepting the sick of all races and creeds, including those others turned away.

In 1883, when an appeal went out across the world for help with the leprosy patients exiled to the Hawaiian islands — and was refused by many — Marianne answered at once, sailing with six of her sisters to care for the outcasts whom society had abandoned. She organized hospitals on Oahu and Maui, and then went to the isolated settlement on Molokai, taking up the work of the dying St. Damien and caring for him at the end.

She spent the last thirty years of her life on Molokai among the leprosy patients, bringing them not only medicine but beauty, cleanliness, and joy — flowers, bright dresses for the girls, music, and unfailing tenderness. She had promised her sisters that none of them would contract the disease, and across all those decades not one of them did. She died on Molokai in 1918 and was canonized in 2012.

She promised her sisters none of them would catch leprosy in their work — and across decades on Molokai, not one ever did.

“I am hungry for the work.”
— St. Marianne Cope