Saint Ann
Anne, Hannah — Sancta Anna
The mother of the Blessed Virgin and the grandmother of Christ — of whom scripture says nothing whatever, and about whom the Church has never stopped talking.
- Feast
- 26 July
- Dates
- First century
- Patron of
- Grandmothers, mothers, women in labour, miners, cabinetmakers, and Brittany
Not one word about her survives in the canonical scriptures. Everything the Church says of Saint Ann comes from the Protoevangelium of James, a second-century document that is not scripture and does not pretend to be, and from the enormous affection of ordinary Christians, which has never required documentation.
That account gives her a husband, Joachim, a long childlessness borne as a public humiliation, and at last an angel with the news that she would bear a child. The child was Mary. The pattern is the oldest one in Israel — Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth — the barren woman who is heard, and whose child belongs in some particular way to God.
Why she was loved
The devotion is not really about the biography, which is thin and late. It is about the fact that Christ had a grandmother: that the Incarnation reached back into an ordinary family with in-laws and a household and an older generation who had done the raising. God did not appear in the world as an adult stranger. He arrived inside somebody’s family, and Ann is the proof of it.
Which is why the people who have prayed to her hardest have generally been women — those wanting children, those in labour, those raising grandchildren in their sixties because someone has to. She is invoked for the unglamorous continuity of families, the part nobody writes down.
Her cult
Her relics came west after the crusades and her shrines multiplied — Sainte-Anne-d’Auray in Brittany, Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec, Saint Ann’s in Cleveland. In the Middle Ages she was among the most painted women in Europe. The Anna Selbdritt — Ann, Mary and the Child together, three generations in one frame — became its own genre, and Masaccio’s version is the plate on this page.
The nine-day novena to her is still prayed in those shrines every July, and is the one form of devotion to her that most people have actually met.
A Prayer to Saint Ann
Good Saint Ann, mother of her who is our life, our sweetness and our hope, pray to her for us, and obtain our request.
Thou wast chosen to raise the Mother of God. Watch then over the ordinary houses in which the faith is still handed on — over the mothers who are tired, the grandmothers who are asked for more than they have, and the children who will remember our example longer than our advice. Amen.
The opening invocation is traditional; the rest was written for this collection.