St. Anne

Who they were

Anne does not appear in the New Testament. Everything about her comes from the Protoevangelium of James, a second-century text that the Church does not receive as scripture but which shaped a great deal of Christian art and devotion.

That account gives her a husband, Joachim, and a long childlessness that both of them felt as a disgrace. It describes Joachim's offering being refused at the temple because the couple had no children, his going out into the wilderness in shame, and each of them separately being told they would have a child. The daughter born to them is Mary.

The historical value of the text is limited and worth stating plainly. Its influence is not. Devotion to Anne is ancient in the eastern churches and spread widely in the west from the medieval period, and she is one of the most commonly named women in European history for that reason.

Her shrines are among the busiest in the Catholic world, particularly Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec and Sainte-Anne-d'Auray in Brittany. She is honoured with Joachim on 26 July.

Her name in Hebrew is Hannah, meaning favour or grace, and the parallel with the Hannah of the first book of Samuel, another woman who waited a long time for a child and gave that child to God, is almost certainly deliberate on the part of the second-century author.

In art she is most often shown teaching Mary to read, an image that became enormously popular in the late medieval period and which has no basis in any text. It endured because of what it implies: that whatever Mary knew, she learned from her mother first.

The great shrines carry the devotion. Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré near Quebec City has been a pilgrimage site since the seventeenth century, founded by Breton sailors, and the columns of crutches left inside it are among the most photographed objects in Canadian Catholicism.

Why people turn to St. Anne

Anne is asked for by mothers, by grandmothers, and by women in labour, and the patronage follows from her position rather than from recorded deeds: she is the mother of a mother, the grandmother in the story. The association with infertility and long waiting comes from the account of her childlessness, which is described at length and without any pretence that it was easy to bear. Grandmothers in particular claim her, and the devotion in Quebec and Brittany is largely theirs.

How to ask their intercession

Ask her for the mothers and grandmothers in your family, including the ones no longer living. Women in labour have asked her for centuries and still do. Where the request is for a child who has not come yet, hers is a story with a long wait in the middle of it, and that is the part worth holding onto.