Two upstate women join Roman Catholic sainthood.

Some local news (from my area of the world) that might be of interest.
Two upstate women join Roman Catholic sainthood | syracuse.com

Sister Mary Christopher Dixon stands in the Blessed Marianne Museum in the Sisters of Saint Francis Motherhouse on Court Street in Syracuse. The museum has relics detailing the life of Blessed Marianne Cope who entered the Sisters of Saint Francis in Syracuse in 1862 and spent the last thirty years of her life serving leprosy patients in Kalaupapa, Molokai.
Two women with strong links to Central New York are among seven new saints Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed Monday.
The elevation of Blessed Mother Marianne Cope and Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha (pronounced Gah-deh-LEE Day-gah-GWEE-deh) to 12 the number of American saints among more than 10,000 Roman Catholic saints. Kateri becomes the first Native American saint.

No date has been set for the Vatican canonization ceremonies, although they could be as soon as May. It is unclear if the two local saints will be canonized in the same ceremony.
Kateri was a 17th-century Mohawk who converted to Christianity and defended her faith, despite personal abuse and persecution.
Mother Marianne was former leader of the Syracuse-based Sisters of St. Francis, co-founder of St. Joseph’s Hospital, and longtime nurse and minister to hundreds of lepers on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.


Mother Marianne was born in Germany in 1838. She lived in the Syracuse area from 1862 to 1883, when she began her missionary work in Hawaii. She died in Kalaupapa, the leper settlement where she worked for 33 years, in 1918.
The Vatican required two miracles attributed to Mother Marianne to make her eligible for canonization. Both miracles were medical recoveries doctors could not explain. The first case involved Kate Mahoney, a Syracuse teenager with multiple organ failure in 1993 who recovered as the result of prayers for the intercession of Mother Marianne. Mahoney, now 33, is healthy. After the Vatican confirmed that it considered Mahoney’s recovery a miracle, Mother Marianne was beatified in a May 2005 ceremony at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Italy.
Officials from the Sisters of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities, a women’s religious community based on Syracuse’s North Side, will provide details today about the second miracle, which made Mother Marianne eligible for sainthood. Franciscan leaders previously said the second miracle involved the recovery of an ill woman.
Kateri, known as the Lily of the Mohawks, was born in 1656, the daughter of a Christian Algonquin mother and a Mohawk chief at Ossernon, now known as Auriesville, about 110 miles east of Syracuse in Montgomery County. As a child, she contracted smallpox, which killed her father, mother and baby brother. Kateri recovered but suffered lasting health problems.


On April 5, 1676, she was baptized a Catholic by Jesuit missionaries. She died during Holy Week 1680 at the age of 24. Kateri’s smallpox scars are said to have disappeared after death, which some consider a miracle.
The late John Paul II waived the first miracle typically required for beatification, according to Religion News Service.
The second miracle, approved Monday by Pope Benedict XVI, involved a 6-year-old Native American boy in Washington state who was inexplicably cured of a flesh-eating virus, RNS reported.
Emily Garrow-Stewart, a Mohawk who is director of the Syracuse Kateri Tekakwitha Committee, based at St. Lucy Roman Catholic Church, has been praying for Kateri’s canonization since the 1950s.

“I’m just thrilled,” she said. “We’ve been waiting so long.”