Mother Marianne of Molokai, a leader in the religious community of the Sisters of Saint Francis in Syracuse, NY., received both church and state honors posthumously in 2005 when she was proclaimed Blessed at the Vatican in May and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame at Seneca Falls, NY, in October.  Known for her works of heroic charity in New York State, she chose to respond to a call of desperation from Hawaii in 1883 for a hospital leader to set up a system of care for its poor and sick. She led the Franciscan mission until the end of her life spending her last thirty years at the settlement for leprosy patients at Kalaupapa, Molokai.

Biography Of Mother Marianne Cope

Family and Early Life

Mother Marianne, formerly Barbara Koob (variants: Kob, Kopp, and now officially Cope) was born on January 23, 1838 and baptized the following day in what is now SE Hessen, West Germany.  She was the daughter of farmer, Peter Koob, and Barbara Witzenbacher Koob.  Peter Koob’s first wife had nine children before she died, only two of whom reached adulthood.

By his second wife, Barbara’s mother, Peter Koob had five children in Germany, and five in the United States.  In 1839, the year following Barbara’s birth, the family emigrated to the United States to seek opportunity.

The Koob family became members of St. Joseph’s Parish in Utica, N.Y., where the children attended the parish school.  In 1848, Barbara received her First Holy Communion and was confirmed at St. John’s parish in Utica, when in accordance with the practice of the time, the bishop of the diocese came to the largest church in the area to administer these two sacraments at the same ceremony.

When Peter Koob became a naturalized citizen in the 1850s so did his children who were minors at the time become American citizens including his daughter Barbara.

Mother Marianne wrote of experiencing a religious life calling at an early age and that the following of her vocation was delayed nine years because of her family obligations. The oldest child at home, she, after completing an eighth grade education, went to work in a factory to support the family when her father had become an invalid.  It only was at the time that her younger siblings were of age to be self-providing that she felt free to enter the convent.  She did so one month after her father’s death in the summer of 1862.  She was twenty-four years of age.

Growth in Religious Life

Barbara entered the Sisters of Saint Francis in Syracuse, N.Y. and, on November 19, 1862, she was invested at the Church of the Assumption.  She soon became prominently known as Sister Marianne.  

One year later at the same church on the same day of the month, Sister Marianne was professed as a religious after which time she served as a teacher and principal in several beginning schools in New York State.  She had joined the Order in Syracuse with the intention of doing schoolwork, but her life soon became a series of administrative appointments. As a member of the governing boards of her religious community, she participated during the 1860s in the establishment of two of the first hospitals in the central New York area, St. Elizabeth’s in Utica (1866) and St. Joseph’s in Syracuse (1869).  Both hospitals begun by the Franciscan sisters had unique charters for their time being open to the sick without distinction as to a person’s nationality, religion or color.  These two hospitals were among the first sixty registered hospitals in the entire United States.   

Biography in a printable PDF

1 | 2 | 3 | NEXT >>