St. Marianne Cope

Who they were

Marianne Cope was a German born Franciscan of Syracuse who ran one of the first hospitals in the United States to admit anyone, alcoholics and outcast patients included, over public objection. That is exactly why she said yes in 1883, when Hawaii's plea for sisters to nurse leprosy patients had already been declined by more than fifty congregations. Her answer was that she was hungry for the work.

She managed the receiving station on Oahu, and in 1888 went to Kalaupapa on Molokai, arriving in time to nurse the dying St. Damien of Molokai and to take over his home for boys. She stayed thirty years, and what she imposed on a settlement built for despair was cleanliness, dignity, and deliberate beauty: bright dresses, ribbons, a garden. She also made her sisters a promise that none of them would ever contract the disease, and across three decades of intimate nursing none of them did, which is a fact of the record rather than a rule anyone should count on. She died at Kalaupapa in 1918 and was canonized in 2012.

Why people turn to St. Marianne Cope

Caregivers of the contagious, the addicted, and the shunned: nurses, aides, hospice staff, anyone whose job is the patient nobody else will take. Hospital administrators, with St. Basil the Great and St. Catherine of Genoa. Hawaii, with Damien, whose work she finished.

How to ask their intercession

For a caregiver by name, and ask for her particular pairing: competence and fearlessness in the same hands, since one without the other is no use to a patient.