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| BLESSED Mother Marianne Cope. |
The successor to Saint Damien Joseph de Veuster of Moloka'i, Mother Marianne Cope, may soon join him in the ranks of the saints after the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints declared her "Blessed" on Tuesday. She was the only one of 50 people to accept a request for nuns to help care for Hansen's disease patients at the Kalaupapa settlement where they had been banished and where Father Damien, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, had ministered to them starting in 1873. She assisted him until his death in 1889 of complications from the Hansen's disease he had contracted at Kalaupapa. Mother Marianne died of natural causes in 1918 after spending the rest of her life working with the leprosy victims. Her initial positive response to go to Kalaupapa earned her the title of "beloved mother of the outcasts," said the
Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities in Syracuse, N.Y. Mother Marianne was born in Germany and raised in Utica, N.Y.
With the canonization last Sunday of Saint Marianne Cope - and with the Solemnity of All Saints coming up November 1 - Franciscan Father Larry Janowski passed along this quote from Charlotte Recarte in the New York Times about Mother Marianne: "She was just an ordinary person, like us. Inside all of us, we can be saints. We just have to do the work." Thanks, Fr. Larry.