Mother Marianne Cope's remains will be placed in the convent's chapel while the women decide whether they will build a special chapel to honor her.

Sister Dillenschneider, Sister Patricia Burkard, who is general minister of the community, and Sister Mary Laurence Hanley plan to leave Jan. 22. The exhumation is expected to begin Jan. 24. They expect to return with Mother Marianne's remains in February.

Pope John Paul II last month accepted a report of a miracle attributed to the intervention of Mother Marianne — a Syracuse teenager who had suffered multiple organ failure and recovered after she was touched by a relic of Mother Marianne and prayers sought Mother Marianne's intercession in the girl's healing.

That cleared the way for beatification, expected this year, the last step before canonization, or sainthood. As part of the process, Mother Marianne's remains must be exhumed and identified.

Once beatified, she takes the title Blessed and is assigned a feast day on the church calendar. Acceptance of a second miracle is required for sainthood.

Mother Marianne, born Barbara Koob in Germany in 1838, took the name Marianne in 1862 when she joined the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis in New York.

When the Kingdom of Hawai'i sought help caring for leprosy patients at the Kaka'ako Branch Hospital in 1883, Mother Marianne and six other sisters volunteered to go to Honolulu.

Five years later, she moved to the isolated peninsula of Kalaupapa on Moloka'i, where she worked and lived until she died in 1918 at age 80.

In July 2004, the Sisters of St. Francis was created by merging the Syracuse community with Franciscan communities from Buffalo and Hastings-on-Hudson in an effort to continue the ministry of women's religious groups, which have seen a decrease of about 50 percent since 1965. At the end of the 1960s, the Syracuse community numbered 600 women. Today, the merged group numbers about 500.

Meanwhile, efforts to gain sainthood for Father Damien DeVeuster, the Belgian missionary with whom Mother Marianne worked at Kalaupapa, hit a snag this month when the Vatican suspended its review of his case, a church official said.