Oct. 21st.
(CNN) -- An American health care pioneer will receive the Roman Catholic Church's highest honor this weekend. On Sunday, Mother Marianne Cope -- along with another North American,
Kateri Tekakwitha -- will become a saint, a designation so difficult to
achieve that only 10 other Americans have been canonized before her.
Saint Marianne Cope, as she will soon be known, may be best remembered
for her work with patients suffering from Hansen's disease -- or lepers,
as they were called at the time.
In Hawaii in the late 1800s, people were so afraid of the disease that
even those with simple, unrelated rashes were often banished to the
remote island of Molokai. They remained at this leper colony for the
rest of their lives, far away from family and friends. Their children
became orphans.
An island priest who was worried about this health crisis wrote to
nearly 50 different religious congregations asking for help. But the
work was perceived as so dangerous that only Mother Marianne responded.
Before she made her long journey to the remote islands, though, she
radically changed medical practices on the mainland.
'A Wonderful Hospital Administrator'
Mother Marianne opened and operated some of the first general hospitals
in the United States, St. Elizabeth Hospital in Utica, New York, in 1866
and St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, New York, in 1869.
Both are still in operation today. At that time, hospitals had a bad reputation. Doctors had limited
medical knowledge and even less understanding of how diseases spread.
Most patients who turned to hospitals for help never left them alive.
Mother Marianne started to change that, first by instituting cleanliness
standards. The simple act of hand-washing between patient visits cut
the spread of disease significantly. Word of her facility's success
spread quickly, according to Sister Patricia Burkard. "She was a wonderful hospital administrator and really started the
patients' rights movement and truly changed how people cared for the
sick," said Burkard, who until recently held the same office Mother
Marianne did as head of her religious congregation, now known as the
Sisters of Saint Francis of the Neumann Communities.
Leaders at the College of Medicine in Geneva, New York, heard about
Mother Marianne's success and decided to relocate to her area.
It became Syracuse University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and
its students went on to perfect their skills at Mother Marianne's
hospitals. That meant her patients had access to some of the top medical
minds in the country and some of the most cutting-edge treatments. The addition of student doctors also gave Mother Marianne's patients an
unheard of choice. They were asked if they wanted to be seen by a
student or cared for by someone with more experience. Mother Marianne made sure the medical facilities welcomed all people
regardless of race, creed or economic standing. That was many decades
before desegregated hospitals. She even weathered criticism for caring
for alcoholics. She treated their problem -- which was seen by many
experts as a moral failing unworthy of help -- like a disease. "She was clearly far ahead of the times," Burkard said.
Travels to Hawaii
In 1883, Mother Marianne left those hospitals in good hands, Burkard
said, and traveled with six sisters to Hawaii. When they arrived in
Hawaii, church bells rang and a gathered crowd cheered to welcome them. Within a year, she established the first general hospital on Maui. The
facility was so successful that King Kalakaua honored her with the medal
of the Royal Order of Kapiolani. She also opened the Kapiolani Home,
which cared for the many female orphans of patients with Hansen's
disease.
At the government's request, she took over another badly run medical
facility in Honolulu. The hospital, which was supposed to house only 100
patients, housed 200. Its deplorable conditions were described in a
diary kept by one of her fellow Franciscans and quoted in a book about
Mother Marianne's life, "A Song of Pilgrimage and Exile."
"Fat bedbugs nested in the cracks (of walls). Brown stains upon walls,
floors, and bedding showed where their blood-filled bodies had been
crushed by desperate patients. Straw mattresses, each more or less
covered by a dirty blanket, lay upon the unswept floor. ... Blankets,
mattresses, clothing, and patients all supported an ineradicable
population of lice," wrote Sister Leopoldina Burns.
"When she got to Honolulu, it was roll up the sleeves and clean the
places up," Burkard said. "That was the story wherever they went. The
sisters came in with their bucket brigade. They brought order, and I
guess a lot of TLC to people no one else wanted to help."
Mother Marianne's efforts were so successful her patients were allowed
to remain on the main islands, but in 1887 a new government took charge.
Its officials decided to close the Oahu hospital and reinforce the old
banishment policy. Mother Marianne decided to follow them to Molokai,
even though it meant she'd never return.
On the Island of Molokai
On the island, Father Damien DeVeuster, whom the Catholic Church named a
saint in 2009, had established a medical facility known as the Apostle
of the Lepers. By the time Mother Marianne arrived, he was dying from
Hansen's disease.
At his request, she told him she would care for his patients. Upon his
death, she took over his facility that cared for men and boys and
established a separate enterprise to treat girls and women.
Saint Damien of Molokai's patients had been living in rudimentary huts.
They dressed in rags. Mother Marianne wanted to improve their lives.
She raised money and started programs that gave the ill population a
much more dignified life. She set up classes for patients. She worked to
beautify the environment with gardens and landscaping. Patients got
proper clothes, music and religious counseling. She couldn't cure them,
but she could make their lives better.
Mother Marianne died on August 9, 1918, at the age of 80. Incredibly, to
this day none of the Franciscan sisters have ever contracted Hansen's
disease.
Almost immediately the sisters started organizing her case for
sainthood. To become a saint, a person must meet a strict set of
religious and otherworldly requirements. Once a person dies, this kind
of local effort must be made on their behalf.
The sisters gathered all of Mother Marianne's written work and
correspondence. They took testimony from people who knew her. This
evidence of her holiness had to be presented to a local council, which
made a recommendation that she was worthy of consideration to the
Vatican. There, a team of nine theologians pored over the documents.
The theologians voted in her favor, and then the Pope John Paul II named
her a "Servant of God, Venerable." This is the honorific after which
most cases for sainthood stop.
To become a saint, it's not enough to do good deeds. People must pray to
the person under consideration, and the Church must establish that in
doing so those prayers resulted in not one, but two verifiable miracles. "A miracle is some extraordinary fact, especially in the medical field
-- a cure that nobody expected and suddenly, against all expectations,
this person is cured," said Father Peter Gumpel, a priest who has
scrutinized hundreds of sainthood cases in his nearly 50 years as a
"devil's advocate," or someone at the Vatican who examines the case made
on behalf of a potential saint. "Miracles are still required because the Church has to be absolutely
sure what we are doing in canonizing someone conforms to the will of
God," he said. "To do this, we ask for a sign from God."
After a case is made that a miracle has occurred, a team of doctors must
verify that there is no medical explanation for the cure. Then the case
goes to a second group of doctors who consult for the Vatican, who go
over those same records and must make the same determination. The
process then starts over again once a second miracle occurs. Many of these cases take hundreds of years. Mother Marianne's got through in record time.
Mother Marianne's Miracles
Mother Marianne's first official miracle came in 1992. That's when
Syracuse resident Kate Mahoney recovered after her doctors had given up
hope. The then-14-year-old had a near-fatal reaction to the chemotherapy she
received to treat ovarian cancer. In December of that year, she was
admitted to the hospital suffering from severe abdominal pain.
Doctors performed surgery to remove an internal buildup of fluid. During
the surgery, she suffered a serious hemorrhagic shock followed by
cardiac arrest. Many of her vital organs shut down. Machines kept her
alive when her heart, kidney and lungs stopped working.
According to the medical file submitted to the Vatican, three doctors
determined Mahoney's body was in the process of overall deterioration.
They thought she would die. It was around then that friends reached out to Sister Mary Laurence
Hanley. Hanley was the director of the Cause of Mother Marianne and the
person who put her case for sainthood together. The sister visited the sick girl. She prayed for Mother Marianne's help,
enlisting others to do the same. She touched Mahoney with a relic from
the soon-to-be-saint.
That week, Mahoney showed signs of improvement. By the next week, her
medical records show doctors recording their "surprise" that her vital
organs started to work again "for some unknown reason." Eventually local
and Vatican doctors determined there was no medical explanation for her
full recovery.
In 2005 Pope Benedict XVI agreed that Mahoney had experienced a miracle.
Mother Marianne was beatified, one step away from sainthood. It was in that same year that the second miracle happened. Sharon Smith, then 58, was admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital Health
Center in Syracuse. She says she had been at home and fainted. "I woke up two and a half months later in the hospital," Smith said.
Her doctors told her she had developed a severe inflammation that was
killing her pancreas and was spreading to other vital organs. Several
surgeries did little to help. Her doctor consulted several experts. None
could remember anyone recovering from similar cases. The doctor told
Smith there was little they could do for her.
"When I heard that, I started thinking about my time in the Navy," the
Gulf War veteran said. "I thought, 'I have led an interesting life. I
have great friends. I have some wonderful memories. Lord, if you have to
take me, at least I have these.'" Smith mentally prepared for death. "But for some reason He was nice enough to leave me here," she said, laughing.
Smith says the doctors did what they could to keep her comfortable. They
even tried surgery to repair a huge hole that had opened between her
stomach and intestine, but it didn't work. That's when the Franciscan
sisters stepped in.
"My friend was sitting in the waiting room with my longtime roommate Pat
while I was in surgery," Smith said. "The doctor came in to tell them,
'She is not going to breathe on her own again.' My roommate came in and
said goodbye, and then my other friend came in and told her that this
lady in the waiting room gave her a prayer card with Mother Marianne on
it and suggested they pray for her help. "They did, and I woke up. I started breathing on my own," Smith said.
The nuns paid regular visits to Smith, who is not Catholic. They kept
her company. They prayed with her. They brought her communion. Then
Sister Michaeleen Cabral pinned a small plastic bag on Smith's hospital
gown. Inside was dirt from around Mother Marianne's grave -- known in
the church as a relic. "When they pinned that relic on me, I started feeling a little better,"
Smith said. "A little while later, when I opened my eyes, my doctor
started pulling out my tubes. "When he started pulling out the last one, I said to myself, 'This is
it.' But instead he said, 'Now I want you to order a sandwich.' I didn't
think I heard him right. I hadn't eaten in nine months. I said, 'Are
you kidding me?' But he said, 'No, order anything you want to eat. I
don't know what happened, but the hole I couldn't fix between your
stomach and intestine has healed itself. Your inflammation is gone.
You're better.'"
Mother Marianne had helped one last patient.
Smith finally left the hospital in January of 2006. "I had never heard
of Mother Marianne before this, but all those prayers with the help of
God and Mother Marianne's intercession, I survived," Smith said. "I'm
still flabbergasted."
'You are Our Miracle'
To give back to the sisters who helped her, Smith started regularly
volunteering at Francis House, a medical facility the sisters run to
care for the terminally ill. Smith spends much of her time there
cleaning rooms and visiting patients. As she walked out of a patient's room one day, she ran into the nun who used to bring her communion at the hospital.
"She said, 'Oh my God, are you the girl I saw in the hospital who was so
sick?'" Smith said. "I thought Sister Michaeleen was going to pass out.
"She told me, 'You've got to see Sister Mary Laurence. You are our
miracle. I know you are.' They dragged me up to Sister Mary Laurence,
who was amazed. They thought they had their miracle."
And so it was, the Catholic Church concluded. After multiple doctors
examined her medical records and could find no other explanation, the
case went on to Pope Benedict XVI. In December 2011 he announced Mother
Marianne would become a saint.
This weekend, Mahoney and Smith are both at the Vatican for the
canonization service. Smith will present Pope Benedict XVI with a cross
that contains a dirt relic from Mother Marianne's grave. To this day,
Smith wonders why she has been chosen to be a part of something so big.
"I can't imagine that someone like me would experience a miracle. I'm an
ordinary person," Smith said. "But the sisters explained that's who God
and the saints use."
Sister Burkard is at the Vatican, as well.
"Every time I think about the large banner with her image that will hang
on the Vatican for the ceremony, I get chills," she said.
"People tend to think of saints as these very special otherworldly
people, but so much of (Mother Marianne's) life parallels so many other
good people we know today," Burkard said.
"She probably could have done anything with her natural talents for
leadership and organization, but she chose to make the world a better
place. She would not let people's fear determine what she did or how
people should be treated.
"She is a wonderful example for these difficult times. She gave people
that others feared hope. She restored their dignity. That is the path
she chose to walk."
By Jen Christensen CNN+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Mozlink
The exiled lepers encountered by Marsden (Google Books)
Margaret
Tonga sits between her leprosy-afflicted parents in Mogiri, south
Sudan, 2007. Following years of war, they have not been able to receive
proper treatment or medicine. (Stringer/Reuters)
Oct 19, 2012 (Weekend Edition Saturday) — During a tragic era in
Hawaiian history, more than 8,000 people with leprosy -- now known as
Hansen's disease -- were banished to the island of Molokai. Mother
Marianne Cope began caring for these patients in the late 1800s,
answering their desperation with hope. Sunday, the nun became a
saint.
