Mother Marianne Cope, a 19th-century Roman Catholic nun from upstate New York, spent 30 years on Moloka'i's windswept Kalaupapa Peninsula, caring for the needs of patients suffering from the disease once known as leprosy.
She arrived in Hawai'i in 1883 with a group of Franciscan nuns to help the Hawaiian government run the Kaka'ako Branch Hospital on O'ahu, a receiving station for Hansen's disease patients.
Five years later, she moved to Kalaupapa and helped establish Bishop Home for more than a hundred homeless girls who had been sent there without their families.
Hansen's disease was considered incurable at the time, and it was reaching epidemic proportions in Honolulu. The kingdom exiled its unfortunate victims to Kalaupapa to die.
Mother Marianne brought meaning to their lives. She taught them to sew and play in a band. She worked to erase the stain of being discarded.
Although she longed to return to her home in Syracuse, she died on Moloka'i in 1918 and was buried in the tiny community she had served.
But in 2005, her remains were exhumed and flown to Syracuse as an early step on the road to possible sainthood. Later that year, she was beatified during a ceremony at the Vatican.
