The past few weeks have been
what I consider a nightmare. I have been
in and out of the hospital, emotionally up and down, as well as concerned and
afraid. Out of it all has come a strange
mixture of poetry, history and a dose of religion.
I was reading an article on
St. Josephs Hospital when stories of poetry and Mother Marianne Cope rose out
of the pages of time and whizzed into today.
My poetry blog that I work on
periodically was stuck in a standstill of thoughts and rhymes, and I hit a
story on Robert Louis Stevenson. Seems
that Stevenson took time to visit Kalawao, on May 22, 1889, and he visited the
hospital for Lepers run by the Sisters whose leader was Sister Marianne Cope.
Under Mother Cope’s leadership the sisters ran the Kaka’ako Branch of a
Hospital on the island of Oahu. It is
here that patients of Leprosy (also know as Hansen’s disease) from all of the
Hawaiian Islands were sent. This
location was used as a site of isolation for lepers, keeping them from the
general population.
While there Stevenson wrote this poem:
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.
This poem was such a great
find, since I was in St. Joseph’s Hospital one of the very Hospitals that she
worked so hard to found here in CNY in the 1860’s, the other being St. Elizabeths
in Utica. It is at that time Sister Marianne was elected to the Governing
Council of her religious order (Franciscan Nuns) and appointed Superior General Director of the
very hospital I was in. At that time St.
Joe’s was considered the first public hospital to take in all patients regardless
of race, color or creed. Mother Marianne served in that position from 1870
until 1877.
The thing that changed her
life and history, was a letter in 1883 from a Father Damian in Hawaii,
requesting help. By this time she was
the Provincial Mother of the area and wrote that she was “hungry for the work
and not afraid of catching the dreaded disease.” And so she went to Hawaii.
That day I had asked a friend,
Barbara Keough, to bring me my copy of the Mother Cope prayer and the card put
out by the Sisters of St. Frances to help get Sainthood proclaimed for
her.
It is here that this story intersected
with another piece of my life for it was one of the two women…. who were the
miracles attributed to Mother Cope, was a good friend and had been a nurses aide for my mother…her name was Kate Mahoney.
That night I ran a raging
fever and when it broke I realized I was still holding clenched in my hand the
card with the picture of Cope and her prayer. It is then that I realized while
gazing at the rooms memo board that the date was January 23rd, the
day set aside by the Catholic Church to honor our new Saint.
I like so many are praying to
her for help and I can’t help but feel that I was helped by her that night.
For more information on Saint Marianne Cope you can visit the Internet and the many sites devoted to
her life and her miracles. I have also
written a blog on our two new CNY Saints Kateri and Mother Cope. I also attribute a personal miracle to Mother
Cope involving my mother. Here is a link to it… http://backstreetmary.blogspot.com/2011/12/mother-cope-close-to-home.html
Kate Mahoney has a Facebook page
