By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

Blessed Marianne Cope of Molokai will receive two honors, one national and one local, this weekend in New York.

The Franciscan Sister from Syracuse, who spent the last 30 years of her life serving Hawaii’s Hansen’s disease patients, will be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls on Oct. 8.

On Oct. 9, a special bronze plaque in her honor will be installed in Syracuse’s Northside Walk of Honor, a four-block sidewalk honoring those who made contributions to that part of the city.

Blessed Marianne will be among 10 inducted in the hall of fame in Seneca Falls, considered the birthplace of the woman’s rights movement. Picked by a national panel of judges, the inductees represent significant contributions in the areas of medicine, arts, athletics, education, business, humanities, government and science.

Six of the honorees, including Blessed Marianne, are historic figures being honored posthumously.

The honorees are Betty Bumpers, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dr. Rita Rossi Colwell and Maya Y. Lin. The posthumous inductees are Florence Ellinwood Allen, Ruth Fulton Benedict, Mother Marianne Cope, Patricia Locke, Blanche Stuart Scott and Mary Burnett Talbert.

Mother Marianne was known for defending, with justice and charity, the dignity of the sick, particularly those whose illnesses had made them society’s outcasts.

About 40 Sisters of St. Francis will attend the event including Sister William Marie Eleniki, Hawaii regional administrator of the Sisters of St. Francis, and Sister Mary Laurence Hanley, director of Mother Marianne’s canonization cause.

Also attending will be Blessed Marianne’s great-great-grandnephew, Dr. Paul DeMare, a Hawaii physician. Dr. DeMare and Sister Patricia Burkard, the Franciscan Sisters’ general minister, will each receive a hall of fame medallion for Mother Marianne as representatives of her natural and religious families.

Blessed Marianne will be one of six receiving a plaque in Syracuse’s Northside Walk of Honor on Oct. 9. Hers is a special posthumous honor. The others, including fellow Sister of St. Francis Kathleen Osbelt, the founder of St. Francis House, a residence for those with terminal illnesses, are living honorees.

Mother Marianne opened and administered the first hospital in Syracuse which is located on the Northside. She was also instrumental in bringing a medical college to the city.

Mother Marianne left her active pioneering career in hospital administration and medical education in Syracuse in 1883 when she led a group of five other Franciscan Sisters to Hawaii to care for the kingdom’s leprosy patients. She worked in Honolulu, on Maui and in Kalaupapa, continuing the work of Blessed Damien after his death in 1889.

She died and was buried in Kalaupapa in 1918. Her remains were brought to her Franciscan motherhouse in Syracuse this past February and are enshrined in the motherhouse chapel. She was beatified on May 14 in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.