Poem written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1889

Reverend Sister Marianne Matron of the Bishop Home, Kalaupapa To see the infinite pity of this place, The mangled limb, the devastated face, The innocent sufferers smiling at the rod, A fool were tempted to deny his God. He sees, and shrinks; but if he look again, Lo, beauty springing from the breast of pain!— He marks the sisters on the painful shores, And even a fool is silent and adores. Robert Louis Stevenson Kalawao, May 22, 1889

Interview with Mother Marianne’s Nurse in 1941

Utica Reporter:  Do the books and stories about Mother Marianne exaggerate her qualities?

Nurse: “No, Mother Marianne was the gentlest, the cheeriest and the most dignified person you could imagine, and a disciplinarian, too.

Mother Marianne Cope shortly before her death on August 9. 1918.

“She revolutionized life on Molokai, brought cleanliness, pride and fun to the colony. People on Molokai laugh now—like other people in the world, laugh at the same things, the same dilemmas and jokes.”

“It was Mother Marianne who bought the girls hair ribbons and pretty things to wear, dresses and scarves. Women keep their cottages and their rooms in the big communal houses neatly, pride fully. There are snowy bedspreads, pictures on the walls. They set their tables at meal time with taste, Mother Marianne brought that about.”

“She interested the women in color harmony. Sit in services at the back of the church in Molokai and observe the lovely arrangements of color of the women. When Mother Marianne went to the island, people there had no thought for the graces of life. ‘We are lepers,’ they told her. ‘What does it matter?’ Well, she changed all that. Doctors have said that her psychology was 50 years ahead of her time.”

Sister Magdalene was one of the nuns who attended Mother Marianne during her last illness, an old woman, but still valiant.

“She knew that the end was near but on that last day she insisted on joining the nuns at mealtimes. ‘No tears,’ she said. ‘Of course, I am coming to table. Why not?’ That night she died while we were at her bedside.”

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Mother Marianne Passes On

Dr. A. Mouritz

The Venerable Mother Superior Marianne died at 10:50 p.m. on Friday, August 9, 1918, at the Bishop Home, Kalaupapa, Molokai; then the waiting Angels most assuredly guided her Spirit, heavenward. She had devoted 29 years of her life [plus] caring for the women and girls of the Home, and also five years previously at the Kakaako Hospital [island of Oahu] from November 8, 1883 to November 13, 1888. Her age at death was [80] years, 6 months and 17 days. The immediate cause of her death was kidney and heart disease…of several years standing.

A Brief World History of Leprosy 1943 [Dr. Mouritz was Father Damien’s physician.]

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Heroine and Martyr

Honolulu Advertiser, August 11, 1918

“Seldom has the opportunity come to a woman to devote every hour of thirty years [at Molokai] to the mothering of people isolated by law from the rest of the world as have been these people. She risked her own life in all that time, faced everything with unflinching courage and smiled sweetly through it all. She came to Honolulu ready to do whatever was required of her. Without blare of trumpets, Sister Marianne entered upon her duties and through thirty long, wearisome years living apart from the world and its comforts, she labored in the cause of a stricken people. She was a heroine in life; she is a martyr in death.”

Mrs. John Bowler, society woman who met Mother Marianne in 1882 upon her arrival.

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Vale Sister Marianne

The Daily Post-Herald, Hilo, Hawaii August 12, 1918

“Locked away from the pulse of life on an island in the Pacific, under surroundings pleasant enough in their outward seeming but which must have wrung her heart, Sister Marianne died at her post on Molokai the other day. Thirty years of her life she had given to those she served [at Molokai.]  Thirty years of her life she had struggled bravely to east the lot of the unfortunate under her care. Father Damien won deserved fame for this self sacrifice. Sister Marianne’s sacrifice was none the less that she escaped the malady her charges suffered from. This is an age of heroes, most of them unsung, and of heroines who scorn fame and do their duty hiding from their right hands what their left hands are accomplishing. France and Flanders have had their thousands of heroic nurses, but none of them deserve more lastingly to be cherished in the minds and hearts of mankind than Sister Marianne who died doing her work.”

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Defied Death Among Leprosy Patients for 35 Years

Fred Dutcher, The Post Standard, Syracuse, NY August 18, 1918

When the roll of the saints is called, Mother Marianne will be there. Fifty-six of the eighty years of her life she gave in the service of the Man of Galilee whose touch made a leper clean, and thirty-five of those she devoted in ministration to the doomed people of Molokai.

Mother Marianne’s name will live on as that of a woman whose noble self-sacrifice ranks with the death-defying devotion of the martyrs of old. No woman ever went out of Syracuse on a greater mission , non from Syracuse ever gave more than she did. She left all she held dear, her friends, the highest office in the Third Order of St. Frances, which she then held, and every earthly tie, when she heard the call, ‘Come to Molokai.’