The diocese will celebrate the first feast day of Blessed Mother Marianne Cope eight months after her beatification, on Jan. 23, her birthday. As one who has been beatified, she has been given a date on the liturgical calendar which may be observed in those particular places where she is venerated.

Those places are the Diocese of Syracuse where she grew up and entered religious life and the Diocese of Honolulu where she served the victims of Hansen’s disease for 35 years and where she died.

Bishop Larry Silva will celebrate her feast day Mass on Monday, Jan. 23, at 5:30 p.m., at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace in Honolulu. The public is welcome.

The day before, the bishop will preside at a 10 a.m. Mass in her honor in Kalaupapa, Molokai — where Blessed Marianne worked and was first buried — for patients, residents, Sisters of St. Francis and others.

Beatification is the last major step before canonization, the declaration of sainthood. Once a person achieves sainthood, his or her feast day is put on the universal church calendar.

Because she is a beatified American, Blessed Marianne may eventually be put on the national liturgical calendar with the approval of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and affirmation by the Vatican.

Blessed Damien’s feast day was changed from a local observance to national observance on Dec. 20, 1999, with a letter from the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship. The letter, by Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez, confirmed a decision made a month earlier by the U.S. bishops to place Blessed Damien on the national liturgical calendar as an “optional memorial.”

The date was originally set for April 15, the day Blessed Damien died. Because that date fell during the season of Lent, the feast was later changed at the initial request of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts to May 10, the day Damien set foot on Molokai.

Mother Marianne Cope was a New York Franciscan Sister who came to Hawaii in 1883 to care for children and adults afflicted with the then-fatal disease of leprosy. She was beatified by Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins on May 14 in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

After coming to Hawaii, she never returned to her Franciscan motherhouse in Syracuse. She died in 1918 and was buried in Kalaupapa. One year ago this month, her remains were exhumed as part of the beatification process and brought to the Syracuse motherhouse where a shrine is planned.