Catholic Education

July 20, 2012

Two Saints of Molokai

Saint Marianne Cope & Saint Damien de Veuster

an excerpt from Spirit 2012-2013 by Joan Mitchell, CSJ

Only Mother Marianne Cope answered one of the 50 letters inviting religious communities to care for people with leprosy in the Hawaiian Islands. The request was made on behalf of King Kalakaua and Queen Kapiolani. Mother Marianne was a Franciscan sister. Perhaps St. Francis, who kissed a leper and gave the man his cloak, inspired her to follow his example and serve these outcast people.

On October 21, the Catholic Church will canonize Mother Marianne of Molokai. For 35 years she cared for the lepers of Hawaii and continued the work of St. Damien of Molokai, who was made a saint in 2009. Both cared for people no one else did.

When her father got sick, Barbara Cope quit school in eighth grade and worked in a mill to help support her family. At 24, she entered the Franciscan Sisters in Syracuse, New York. Never a nurse, Sister Marianne became the administrator of the sisters’ hospital in Syracuse and led it to become an outstanding teaching hospital. The sisters elected her their leader; she became Mother Marianne.

Mother Marianne and six other Franciscan sisters traveled from Syracuse, New York, to the Island of Oahu, arriving November 8, 1883. The sisters took charge of Kakaako Branch Hospital, which housed people suspected of having leprosy until they were sent to the Island of Molokai for the rest of their lives. The sisters put the hospital in order, cleaned people’s rotting sores, and applied soothing ointments.

Within a year Mother Marianne started a hospital on the Island of Maui for anyone who was sick, not just those with leprosy. Within two years she built a home for the daughters of patients with leprosy to protect the children from getting the disease.

Today we know most people (95%) have a gene that protects us from getting leprosy. Also, medicine today can cure the disease in just weeks. But earlier, to be a leper was to be an outcast. Doctors considered leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease, contagious and incurable.

When doctors diagnosed people with Hansen’s disease, police locked them up and held them like criminals. Families often tried to hide and care for a family member with leprosy. Even young children were separated from their families. Boats took the people with leprosy to Kalaupapa and dropped them off to spend the rest of their lives there. Some 8,000 people with Hansen’s disease lived on Molokai over time. Most are buried there.

The bishop in Honolulu was reluctant to assign any of his priests to St. Philomena Church on Molokai, even though the people pleaded for one. To serve the people at St. Philomena meant the risk of contracting the disease.

When the bishop decided to send priests for three-month rotations, Father Damien volunteered first and never left. The head of his order wrote to him, “You can stay as long as your devotion dictates.” He served the people for 16 years until he died of leprosy at 49. Damien drew no difference between lepers and everyone else, between us and them.

Joseph de Veuster grew up in Belgium in a farm family of eight. He received the name Damien when he joined the congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in 1859, a missionary order that served the peoples of the Pacific. Father Damien was ordained a priest at Our Lady of Peace Cathedral in Honolulu in 1864.

Sturdy and steady, Father Damien worked for nine years on the big island of Hawaii. He was five feet eight inches tall. He sometimes traveled 25 miles on horseback to make a sick call. He built eight chapels. He learned the language of the Hawaiians, who blew a conch shell to call people to church. Damien became a priest of the people. “I would gladly give my life for them,” he wrote.

In 1873 Father Damien went to the settlement on the Kalaupapa Peninsula. He slept under a tree for the first weeks he was there. People with leprosy surrounded him. They coughed. Their faces, hands, and feet were often disfigured. Many had smelly sores and little medical care. Father Damien reported that he started to smoke a pipe to counteract the smell when he visited lepers’ homes.

The people who lived at the settlement had a reputation for lawlessness. People had no reason to live and care about one another. They drank. They left people lying outside to die.

Father Damien aimed to help the people suffering from leprosy recover their human dignity. To bury the people with dignity, he fenced a cemetery, dug graves deep enough to keep animals away, and built coffins. He celebrated funeral Masses for those who died. He anointed those who were sick, washed their bodies, and bandaged their sores. He was not afraid to touch them. He sometimes amputated limbs when gangrene set in.

After six months Damien wrote to his brother, “I make myself a leper with the lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ.” Damien did not agree with people who thought leprosy was a punishment from God. He saw the disease as a suffering that he worked to ease. He established a special home for boys.

Steadily Damien used his strength to build small houses, so the settlement began to look like a village. He taught the people to farm and raise animals. He taught them to play musical instruments and started a band. He built a church.

In 1884 Damien was soaking his feet and realized he couldn’t feel the hot water. He knew he had leprosy. The disease destroys nerve endings in the body. He kept on building to finish all the work he could before the disease took the course he knew so well from caring for others.

Father Damien asked Mother Marianne to take over when he died. She led the first group of sister nurses to Molokai in 1888. A thousand people with leprosy lived there. She started a home where girls and women could live. She rebuilt the boys’ home after Father Damien died.

In his last two weeks of life Damien focused on a watercolor of St. Francis of Assisi, who in his prayer so identified with Jesus on the cross that he received the same wounds in his body—the stigmata. St. Damien received the same wounds in his body that he had treated in the patients from whom he never separated himself.

Father Damien died in 1889. Hawaii made Father Damien its representative in the statuary hall in the capitol building in Washington D. C. Today the whole Church recognizes Father Damien and Mother Marianne.

Read the rest of this issue, the first of SPIRIT for 2012-2013.

January 27, 2012

“Unholy Spirits” and the Power of Prayer

This week’s Gospel (Mark 1:21-28) describes Jesus commanding “an unholy spirit” to come out of a man. The people who observe this act wonder at the authority Jesus possesses, exclaiming that even the unholy spirits obey his word. Many people in the technological and scientific world of today might dismiss this reading, thinking it demonstrates the superstitious beliefs of people from long ago. We never have to deal with “unholy spirits,” do we?

*****

On an afternoon that was like many others, my friend Anna glanced up from her chemistry notes and told me she wanted to ask me something. Her mother, Kathy, had not been herself lately. Kathy got angry very easily, yelling at Anna and her siblings for seemingly inconsequential actions. Kathy seemed sad, distanced, and tired almost all the time, and she had stopped playing tennis and knitting, two of her favorite hobbies. Anna wanted to do something to help her mother, but also to help herself. Living with Kathy was making Anna miserable. Anna scheduled a meeting with someone at her church who did spiritual counseling, hoping to get some advice on what she could do to help her mom change. She asked me if I would go with her to that meeting for support.

At the meeting, Anna explained the situation to the counselor. She even offered to try to get her mother to go to counseling. What the counselor told Anna that day is similar to what Alateen members learn (see this week’s Spirit): Anna could not change her mother, no matter how much she wanted to. Anna was discouraged at this news; she desperately wanted to do something to help her mother. I have never forgotten what the counselor said next: “You cannot change your mother, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing you can do. You can pray for her.”

That afternoon, Anna and I prayed for Kathy together. Anna asked me if I would keep praying for Kathy, and I did, every night before I went to bed. Although I never asked, I am sure that Anna prayed for Kathy all the time, too. I am sure of this because a few years later when I visited Anna’s house over a break from college, the mood was entirely different than it had been when Anna and I were in high school. Kathy seemed happier, more like her old self. When I asked Anna if she, too, noticed a change her mom, she smiled. She showed me a scarf and hat set her mom had knitted for her and confided in me that Kathy had been seeing a counselor for a few years and had been honest with Anna about how hard she was working to make changes in herself. “I think our prayers worked,” Anna concluded.

*****

Just because we live in a technological and scientific age, I still believe people have to deal with “unholy spirits.” When we think broadly, so many things could be included in this category: alcoholism and other forms of addiction; depression and other forms of mental illness; rampant consumerism and other consequences of living in a mass media culture… And while it is true that we cannot change or control other people, there is one curative option open to all of us, as Anna discovered: we can pray. And while the healing may not be as quick as that experienced by the man with the unholy spirit in Mark’s Gospel (or may not even happen in our lifetime), we can trust that Jesus continues to speak with authority, working in people’s hearts to help them expel that which keeps them from living fully into their identity as children of God and followers of Christ.

What “unholy spirits” do you think affect people in our society? For whom can you pray?

January 6, 2012

Epiphany

When I imagine the magi, I see them in dark robes, alternating between hunching over tables with maps of the stars and staring intently at the night sky, using whatever technology was available to them to advance their knowledge. They are scholars who set out on their journeys because they have seen a new star and they want to understand its import. They are people who trust in what they see and what they can study, but somewhere along the way they also become people of faith. They begin to trust in revelation, in truth that is simply revealed, in truth that cannot be accounted for in charts and maps. They pay homage to this new king and even listen to their dreams, deciding to return home a different way in order to avoid Herod who wishes to do this new baby harm.

When I first think about the magi, I see only the difference between them and me. The magi are men who lived half a world away two centuries ago. The magi didn’t become believers until the middle of their lives, when they entered the house to find Mary with her holy child. In contrast, my parents baptized me when I was an infant, so I have never not been a believer (which is not the same as never having asked any questions, because I have plenty of those!).

But on another level, I understand the journey of the magi. Like them, I often trust in what I can see and what I can study. This was especially the case when I was applying for college. During my junior and senior years in high school, in a fit of overzealousness, I visited sixteen different colleges in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. Before deciding on where to apply, I made elaborate spreadsheets, so that I could compare all relevant information at one time. I sent out eight applications, and then made even more elaborate pro and con lists in an attempt to somehow figure out where I wanted to spend the next four years of my life. But for the first time in my life, the lists were not working. What was I to do?

Fortunately for me, in the midst of this dilemma, I had to go to the campus of Saint Olaf College for an interview for a possible scholarship. As I walked around campus, my lists and spreadsheets were the furthest thing from my mind. What I noticed, instead, was that a feeling of calm and contentment had come over me. It was a revelation—this was the right place for me!

Since that day walking around Saint Olaf, I still make pro and con lists and still trust a lot in what I can see and what I can study. But my experience taught me to trust in other things, too, particularly to trust that feeling of calm and contentment that comes over me when I just know something is the right thing to do. I see the hand of God in these small moments; they are my epiphanies.

How have you experienced epiphany in your life? What has been revealed to you? How does God manifest God’s self to you? In what do you put your trust?