Saints Joachim and Anne

Saints Joachim and Anne are the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the grandparents of Jesus. Sacred Scripture does not give their names; the Roman Martyrology notes that they have been preserved by ancient Christian traditions. The Church commemorates them together on July 26.

The names and story of Mary’s parents come from the Protoevangelium of James, a second-century apocryphal writing, that is, one outside the canon of the Bible. Other apocrypha later retold the story, among them the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. Everything known about their life therefore comes from tradition, not from reliable historical records.

According to this tradition, Joachim was a devout and wealthy man who, with his wife Anne, remained childless for many years. When he brought an offering to the Temple, he was told that, being childless, he had no right to do so. Ashamed, he withdrew into the desert, where he fasted and prayed for forty days, while Anne begged God for a child. An angel appeared to each of them separately and announced the birth of a child, and Anne promised to dedicate the child to the service of God. Later tradition and art placed the joyful meeting of the spouses at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem. A daughter, Mary, was born to them, and, as the same story tells, they brought her to the Temple when she was three years old.

Devotion to Saint Anne developed first in the East. Around 550 a basilica was dedicated to her in Constantinople. In Jerusalem, near the Pool of Bethesda, Christians venerated the place where, according to tradition, the house of Mary’s parents stood and where she was born. In the twelfth century the Crusaders built there the Church of Saint Anne, which still stands today.

In the West, devotion to Saint Anne spread especially from the twelfth century, and in the thirteenth century her feast began to be kept on July 26. In 1584 it was entered in the Roman Calendar for the whole Latin Church. The memorial of Saint Joachim was kept on various days in the Roman Calendar, from 1913 on August 16. The calendar reform promulgated in 1969 joined the two memorials, and since then the Church has honored Mary’s parents together with an obligatory memorial on July 26.

Pope Francis called them the grandparents of Jesus and in 2021 established the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly, kept every year on the fourth Sunday of July, close to their memorial. In Poland a special place of devotion to Saint Anne is Góra Świętej Anny (Mount Saint Anne), the principal shrine of Opole Silesia, in the care of the Franciscans for generations. For centuries a statue has been venerated there showing Anne holding Mary with the Child in her arms. John Paul II, who came there in 1983, said that Mary learned to be a mother from her own mother. Joachim and Anne are venerated on the strength of the Church’s ancient tradition, without a formal canonization.