The remains of Mother Marianne Cope to be retrieved for beatification identification and transport to Syracuse

By Patrick Downes

A parishioner of St. Jude Parish in Kapolei will lead the forensics team that will exhume the body of sainthood candidate Mother Marianne Cope this month in Kalaupapa, Molokai.

The Sisters of St. Francis have selected forensic anthropologist Vincent J. Sava to unearth the remains of their Hawaii founder for the formal identification required for her upcoming beatification. The work will begin Jan 24 and is estimated by Sava to take three days.

The Vatican, on Dec. 20, approved a miracle attributed to Mother Marianne’s intercession, clearing the way for her beatification. The date of her beatification has not yet been announced.

Sava, a quality and training manager at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu, volunteered to do the exhumation as a “private citizen.”

JPAC, whose primary mission is to account for Americans missing in the country’s past wars and conflicts, is not a sponsor of this project.

Sava said he will do a “circumstantial” identification of the remains in Mother Marianne’s grave based on the age at death, race and sex of the remains and artifacts from the burial. It will not be a “positive” identification (as the Dec. 31 issue of the Hawaii Catholic Herald mistakenly described the procedure), which relies on DNA, dental records and fingerprints, evidence that is not available.

According to Sava, the exhumation will be accomplished in two steps.

“First we are going to look at archeology of the grave,” he said in a Jan. 3 telephone interview, to determine “whether the grave has been disturbed.”

He will compare the present arrangement of the grave with eyewitness accounts of Mother Marianne’s burial. The position of the remains can determine if they have been tampered with, he said.

Step number two involves the inspection of the remains, which Sava said, will be done in a “makeshift lab” in the Franciscan Sisters convent at Bishop Home.

“We will do a very cursory examination of the remains,” he said, to determine “her biological profile.”

Sava said he will quickly be able to determine the race, age at death and sex of the remains. “If we are looking at an elderly, white female,” he said, it should be “obvious” that a correct identification will have been made.

Canonical procedures

Because it is an official church procedure carried out for the beatification, the exhumation process will involve diocesan tribunal officials.

Judicial vicar Father Joseph A. Grimaldi, acting as the tribunal judge, will begin the proceedings with a prayer, a swearing in of participants and a brief interrogation of “witnesses” who will attest that this is the burial site of Mother Marianne. He will then order the opening of the grave.

Diocesan chancellor John Ringrose will serve as the “promoter of justice,” making sure that procedures are correctly followed. Sacred Hearts Father Joseph Hendriks, the pastor of St. Francis Parish in Kalaupapa, has been selected to be the notary, or official witness.

Father Thomas Gross, will be present in his capacity as diocesan administrator.

According to Father Grimaldi, if the body is found to be incorrupt, a very rare occurrence and extremely unlikely in this case, “we have to preserve it.”

The procedure will end with a closing ceremony in which parchment documents recording the identification of the remains will be dated, signed and hermetically sealed in a metal or plastic tube which will receive a wax seal and be stamped with the diocesan signet.

The tube will be placed with the remains in a zinc box that will be soldered shut and receive a wax seal.

Final official documents recording the exhumation will then be signed by the tribunal officials.

The Sisters of St. Francis planning to be present at the exhumation are Sister Marion Kikukawa, vice-postulator of the Cause of Mother Marianne; Sister Mary Laurence Hanley of Syracuse, the congregational director of Mother Marianne’s cause; Sister Patricia Berkard, the new general minister of the Sisters of St. Francis; Sister Grace Anne Dillenschneider, assistant general minister of the Sisters of St. Francis; and the Franciscans’ Hawaii region minister Sister William Marie Eleniki.

The great great grandnephew of Mother Marianne, Dr. Paul DeMare, who is a Hawaii resident and St. Francis Hospital physician, will also attend, along with about 15 additional Sisters of St. Francis.

Hawaii’s Sisters of St. Francis are members of the former Sisters of the Third Franciscan Order of Syracuse, which merged on Jan. 1, 2005, with two other upstate New York Franciscan Orders. The new union is called simply the Sisters of St. Francis.

No evidence of an intact coffin

Sava went to Kalaupapa on Nov. 29 to do a survey of the burial site on the grounds of the Bishop Home, including some mapping, sub-surface probing and minimal excavation.

He said he found no burial vault or chamber that would have kept the soil from the coffin. “We probed the ground and did not find evidence of an intact coffin,” he said, which would indicate that the coffin has decayed.

A coffin, Sava explained, is a burial box whose lid is nailed shut, as opposed to a “casket’ which has a hinged cover.

He also found the soil “well drained” with “not a lot of moisture,” conditions that would make preservation of a skeleton favorable.

The gravesite is marked with a monument statue, erected two years after Mother Marianne’s death, depicting St. Francis being greeted by the crucified Christ. Sava said that the assumption is the monument, which stands about 10 feet tall, is at the head of the grave, the border of which is outlined by a rectangular cement “curb.”

“If the monument is over the grave, we have a problem,” he said.

Sava intends to collect everything in the ground related to the burial including coffin hardware, personal belongings that may have been buried with the nun, artifacts, pieces of clothing and other things of value.

“We will put every shovel of dirt though a quarter-inch screen,” he said.

“It will be just like any kind of crime scene,” he said. He will be “taking pictures at every step” and gather the “evidence” in plastic “baggies.” He will also produce a full written report, describing what is found and its condition.

Sava plans to supervise a crew of four volunteers. He had hoped to use JPAC coworkers, but many of the forensic professionals from his lab have been called away to work in the Indian Ocean countries affected by the massive Dec. 26 tsunami. He said he probably will rely on “graduate students and contract archeologists.”

Overall, it is “not a very complex mission,” he said. “It’s pretty straightforward,” and “will be done with hand tools” rather than heavy equipment. He will fly in a few days early to prepare for the exhumation.

‘Very gratifying’ assignment

Sava, who had done forensic anthropological work for 13 years on sites as old as Jamestown in Virginia, finds this assignment “very gratifying.”

As one who now does laboratory training and quality control, he said he doesn’t “deploy very much anymore.” The last time he did field work was in 2001.

It is the first beatification exhumation for this St. Jude parishioner. He joked that he has dug up “a lot of sinners” but this will be his first “saint.”

Sava said that the exhumation directives outlined in canon, or church, law pretty much follow the principles of modern forensic science, with one exception. Church law requires that the identified remains be stored in a zinc “casket” soldered permanently shut, while today’s forensic professionals prefer to use plastic “Pelican” cases — tamper-proof boxes that are sealed without a soldering iron, the heat from which could damage the contents.

Sava will not box the remains, but will turn over the job of sealing and transporting the remains to a funeral director, in this case Borthwick Mortuary, according to Sister Marion Kikukawa.

Sister Marion said that all of Mother Marianne’s remains, which are the property of the Sisters of St. Francis, will be placed in a single metal box, which in turn will be sealed in a “durable and ascetically appropriate outer container” — most likely a case made of koa, a decorative Hawaiian hardwood.

(By contrast, the remains of Blessed Damien, reserved in a shrine in Tremeloo, Belgium, are divided among a number of boxes. One of the boxes, containing the remains of his right hand, was presented by Pope John Paul II to the Hawaii Catholic Church for re-interment in Damien’s original grave at Kalawao.)

Sister Marion said that some “secondary” relics that are discovered — a crucifix or religious medal, perhaps, or a piece of her habit — will remain in Kalaupapa.

The remains will be taken the week after exhumation to Oahu where the Sisters of St. Francis are planning a farewell ceremony at their main convent in Manoa and possibly another at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace. They will then be transported in early February to the Franciscan motherhouse in Syracuse, N.Y., where Mother Marianne left to come to Hawaii and where a shrine in her honor eventually will be built.

A permanent and accessible shrine is another requirement for beatification, which is expected to take place some time this year in Rome in combination with other candidates for sainthood.

Only sister buried in Kalaupapa

“Mother Marianne is the only Franciscan Sister to be buried in Kalaupapa” where she died in 1918, said Sister Marion, She rests outside the Bishop Home, the government sponsored complex named for benefactor Charles Bishop and originally built to house female leprosy patients and the Franciscan Sisters who cared for them.

Today, though not the property of the Franciscans, it serves as their convent.

According to Sava, there are no marked or recorded graves within several hundred yards of Mother Marianne’s site.

Mother Marianne was a leading hospital administrator and the superior of her order of Franciscan Sisters in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1883 when she responded to the Hawaiian government’s appeal for nurses to care for Hansen’s disease patients in Honolulu.

She arrived in Hawaii on Nov. 8, 1883, at age 45, with six other Franciscan Sisters and quickly got to work caring for patients on Oahu and Maui, opening and running housing and healthcare facilities.

Mother Marianne came to the Kalaupapa leprosy settlement on Molokai in 1888, a few months before the death of Blessed Damien de Veuster. She succeeded Father Damien as the settlement’s guiding force, dying there on Aug. 9, 1918, of natural causes.

She now will succeed Damien in being the second person from Hawaii to receive the universal church honor of beatification.

Pope John Paul II beatified Blessed Damien in Belgium in 1995.

This past Dec. 20, the Vatican decree recognized a miracle attributed to Mother Marianne’s intercession — the unexplained healing about a decade ago of a U.S. girl who had experienced multiple organ failure and was expected to die. The girl recovered following prayers that sought Mother Marianne’s intercession.

After Mother Marianne is beatified, she will receive a date on the liturgical calendar as her feast day. A second miracle will be required for her canonization.