c. 2005 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Mother Marianne Cope, a German-born nun who was raised in Utica, N.Y., and worked with lepers in Hawaii, is one step closer to sainthood after she was beatified by the Catholic Church on Saturday (May 14).

At the end of the formal Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, about 300 people waved scarves of red, white and blue in honor of the latest American the Roman Catholic Church has honored with the title “blessed.”

The gesture, which accompanied a Hawaiian and English rendition of the familiar hymn “How Great Thou Art,” was also a sign of victory for the long journey that brought Cope to a place of honor at the heart of the church.

“We got it done,” Sister Mary Laurence Hanley told Bishop James Moynihan of Syracuse, N.Y., after the nearly two-hour Mass.

Hanley, director of the Office of the Cause of Mother Marianne, has worked for more than 30 years to chronicle the history of the Franciscan who ministered to people with leprosy in Hawaii.

About 800 people, including about 300 from Central New York, were at the Mass that honored Mother Cope and Mother Ascension Nicole Goni, a Spanish nun who started the Missionary Dominican Sisters of the Rosary.

“The life of Blessed Marianne Cope is a wonderful work of divine grace,” Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins read in English from a prepared homily that also included sections in Italian and Spanish. “For 35 years, she lived, to the full, the command to love God and neighbors.”

Martins presided at the Mass instead of Pope Benedict XVI, who signaled that he intends to preside only at canonization rites, in which only the pope can declare someone a saint. It was the first time in decades a pope had not presided at a beatification Mass.

On Monday (May 16), Benedict said the two nuns “spoke the language of truth and of love, the only one capable of bringing down the barriers of culture and race.” The two women “let themselves be led by God in the service of the church, the powerless, the sick and the young,” he said.

During an audience with 2,500 pilgrims, Benedict wore three flower leis around his neck that had been given to him by a delegation from Hawaii.

“Exemplary witnesses to the charity of Christ, these two new blesseds help us to better understand the sense and the value of our Christian vocation,” Benedict said. “May the Virgin Mary obtain for us the gift of a constant fidelity to the Gospel. May she help us to follow the example of the new blesseds and to hold tight without tiring to holiness.”

Mother Cope, who was born in Germany and raised in Utica, moved to Syracuse in 1862 to join the Sisters of St. Francis. She went to Hawaii in 1883 as a Franciscan nun to work with lepers, and she died on the island of Molokai in 1918 at age 80.

Franciscan leaders in Syracuse plan to begin discussions among the community’s 500 members about what form a shrine to Mother Cope should take. “There is something mind-boggling that there could be a saint here in our midst who went to the same school I went to,” said Sister Dolorosa Lenk, one of three Franciscans representing St. Elizabeth Convent in Utica.

Moynihan and four priests from Syracuse concelebrated the Mass with Martins. Nearly 100 clergy participated in a service that included sections in English, Italian, Latin and Spanish.

Early in the Mass, after a brief statement by Martins, large banners bearing the images of the two nuns were uncovered in the chapel inside St. Peter’s. A representative of each cause carried forward a vessel with a relic of the blessed person.

Sister Davilyn Ah Chick of Hawaii, a former teacher at Syracuse’s former Maria Regina College, carried the relic, a tiny piece of bone recovered from Mother Cope’s grave on Kalaupapa, a peninsula of Molokai.

Also participating in the ceremony was Winifred Marks Harada, the sole representative of former Kalaupapa leprosy patients at the beatification. Mother Cope left a legacy, Harada said.

“She’s not going to be forgotten,” said Harada, 74, one of 37 surviving former patients.

_ Peggy Polk contributed to this report from the Vatican.

KRE/PH END GADOUA

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