Saint Who?
Saints Who Were Teachers
Saint Marianne Cope
Religious († 1918) Feast: January 23
By 1883, Mother Marianne had been a member of the Sisters of Saint Francis in New York for twenty years. That’s when she received a letter from a priest who begged her to send religious sisters to run his schools and hospitals. The challenge: they would be serving lepers in the Hawaiian Islands.
It was not hard for anyone who knew Marianne to predict her answer. She and her family had moved from Germany to America when she was still a baby. She dutifully supported her family for several years until she was able to pursue her vocation as a religious sister. Once she entered the religious order, she selflessly served as a teacher, school principal, hospital administrator, and even superior for the province.
Marianne didn’t just send sisters to Hawaii. She agreed to go herself, writing to the priest that “it would be my greatest delight…to minister to the abandoned ‘lepers.’” She and six other sisters arrived that same year, managing and founding hospitals, schools, and homes for children with leprosy. Although she spent the rest of her life there, she never contracted the disease and inspired her sisters and those for whom they cared with her optimism and unwavering trust in God.
Compassionate Lord, help us to bring hope
to the hopeless.
