About St. Anne

I am happy to spend this week considering St. Anne, mother of our Blessed Mother, grandmother of Jesus Christ. She has always been one of my favorite saints, and not just because she is the patron saint of my amazing sister, although that is certainly part of it.

The Story of St. Anne

It is difficult to discuss the “facts” about St. Anne because the details of her life are not clear. In fact, much of what we know about St. Anne and St. Joachim (Mary’s father) comes from the Protevangelium of James, an apocryphal Gospel that was rejected by the Western church around the 4th and 5th centuries. Leaders of the church at that time, including St. Jerome, rejected the Gospel of James because it claimed that the brothers of Jesus, mentioned in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55-56, were sons of Joseph by an earlier marriage. They instead explained that we should interpret the “brothers” as cousins of Jesus, sons of Mary’s sisters. Either way, I like that image of St. Anne as the matriarch of a family that brought us our Lord and Savior, as well as a few of His closest Apostles.

St. Anne and St. Joachim are believed to be another couple who spent years trying to conceive a child. Finally, late in life, they received visits from angels bearing the news that they would be blessed with a child, who was Mary. Does this sound like any other biblical stories? Abraham and Sarah believed they could not have children, but God told them they would have a son, and they were blessed with Isaac very late in life. Zechariah and Elizabeth, were also advanced in age when they received the good news that they would have a son. He, of course, was John the Baptist.

Reliability of the Details

Since we don’t have official written records from ancient times, we rely on the sacred scriptures to learn about events that happened so long ago. Sacred scriptures are preferred because we believe they were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and therefore we receive them as the Word of God. But keep in mind, while the Holy Spirit guided the human writers to share God’s message, they were still in control of their own abilities as authors. That said, we have to account for the perspective of an author living in that era, but we believe God inspired the author to deliver the appropriate message.

In the case of St. Anne and St. Joachim, we don’t even have that much confidence. Their story really developed through early Christian tradition, or the process of passing stories down to one another in the early church. It does not appear in sacred scripture. So I wonder if people just mixed up St. Anne’s story with other stories in scripture. It is hard to say whether the details of their lives are completely accurate or not.

The Family

Ultimately, I don’t think those details matter so much. It is clear that God would not choose a couple to be the parents of our Blessed Mother unless they were worthy of such a responsibility. With everything we do know from the Gospels, Mary must have been born to parents who raised her faithfully with a great love and devotion to God.

It does make sense that St. Anne is also the grandmother of several of Jesus’ Apostles, although scholars do not agree about the specifics of these relationships. Some believe that after Joachim’s death Anne remarried and had other daughters, who were the parents of those Apostles.

Sainthood

The Council of Basel endorsed the idea that Mary was conceived without sin in 1438, but it did not become official church doctrine until Pope Pius IX made is so in 1854. While St. Anne has been considered a saint since the early church by virtue of her relationship to Mary and Jesus, her official feast on July 26th is believed to have been established in 1382 by Pope Urban VI, although that date was probably observed as early as the 12th century, especially in some churches in England.