PATRICK PALLADINO / Observer-Dispatch A worshipper kisses the casket that holds the remains of Mother Marianne Cope Wednesday at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Syracuse.

Mother Marianne returns home
Hundreds gather in Syracuse to venerate remains
Originally published Feb. 3, 2005

By ELIZABETH COOPER
Observer-Dispatch

About 300 devotees welcomed the remains of the Venerable Mother

Marianne Cope back to the Syracuse Diocese in a service at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception Wednesday evening.

Her remains were brought into the cathedral in a simple gray casket with a small bouquet of pale pink roses on top.

"I, as bishop of the Diocese of Syracuse, welcome you, Venerable Mother Marianne Cope," Bishop James M. Moynihan said as he stood at the head of the casket as her remains entered the church.

An honor guard flanked the cathedral's main aisle as the casket was brought slowly toward the altar, led by the bishop and other clergy.

Cope, a Franciscan nun who grew up in Utica in the mid-19th century, has been cleared for beatification by the Vatican's Congregation for the Cause of Saints. The pope must approve that decision for Mother Marianne to be officially beatified.

Beatification is a key step in the process toward sainthood.

Mother Marianne was buried in 1918 in Molokai, Hawaii, where she had ministered to people with leprosy for more than 30 years.

Moynihan praised Mother Marianne for her selfless service to leprosy patients in Molokai, and recalled speaking to Pope John Paul about her on a visit to the Vatican.

"(The Pope) said 'She took care of the AIDS patients of her day,'" Moynihan said. "He hit it right on the head."

He also noted that as a person who had ties to Central New York, and called her "our own friend before the throne of God."

A contingent of Utica residents drove to Syracuse for the service, motivated in large part by a feeling of connection to Mother Marianne through a shared sense of place. Most of them came from St. Joseph/St. Patrick parish in west Utica, where Mother Marianne grew up.

"She grew up in Utica," Frank Calaprice said. "She lived in the same neighborhood I live in."

Calaprice lives on Kellogg Street, not far from the Schuyler Street block where Mother Marianne lived as a girl.

Rose Labuz said the same. She works with children in St. Joseph/St. Patrick parish and said the beatification is important to them, too.

"For them to see she grew up in their neighborhood, I think it means a lot," she said.

And Sister Dolorosa, a medical librarian at St. Elizabeth Medical Center and a native of the parish, also felt the connection.

"It makes me feel so close to her," she said. "I feel I can ask her intercession. She's in Heaven looking down on us and blessing our community."

Church law dictates that Mother Marianne's body be exhumed now that she has gotten this far in the beatification process. And the 260 sisters of St. Francis decided that her remains be placed in the diocese where her religious life began.

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