Grandmother

Good St. Anne, by all the suffering and ignominy which thou didst endure, during the 20 years that preceded thy glorious maternity, by thy love for St. Joachim, thy glorious spouse, by thy love for Mary, thy immaculate child, and by the great joy thou didst feel at the moment of her birth, I beseech thee to grant my ardent request.

So last week prayed thousands upon thousands of men, women & children throughout the Christian world, beginning a novena to St. Anne, mother of Mary, grandmother of Jesus, whose day is July 26. U. S. worshippers flocked to Manhattan, to St. Anne's, her national shrine, or to St. Jean de Baptiste, where a fragment of her wristbone is credited with many a miracle of healing. Other U. S. pilgrims traveled to Quebec where they joined Canadians in kneeling at famed St. Anne de Beaupre.

Patroness of the home, of miners, of mothers in labor, is Anne. One of the most popular saints in Christendom, she has 36 churches dedicated to her in the U. S.. 30 in England, uncounted others elsewhere. Few lack a splendidly mounted relic--some part of her body, some object which she touched. By pious account these were brought from the Holy Land in the year 710 to Constantinople, where they lay in famed St. Sophia until 1333. Greeks, Copts, Syrians venerated Anne in the 4th Century, but it was 800 years before she began to win the hearts of Europe.

St. Anne is not mentioned in the Bible. Her story rests solely on three apocrypha the Pseudo-Matthew, the Gospel of the Nativity of Mary, the Protoevangelism of James. Their account:

Childless for 20 years were a rich & pious couple of Nazareth named Joachim and Hannah (Anne). Repulsed from the temple for his childlessness, Joachim one day went out into the mountains and groaned before his God. When Hannah learned why Joachim did not come home she, too, cried to the Lord to take away her curse, promising her child to His service. To Hannah at home, to Joachim in the mountains appeared angels, promising that their prayer would be answered, their child be blessed by all the world. Then Hannah conceived, gave birth to a daughter whom she named Miriam (Mary).

To Church councils belongs the doctrine that Mary, who gave Virgin Birth to Jesus, was without sin from the moment of conception in her mother's womb (Immaculate Conception). Since the apocryphal account of Joachim and Hannah is obviously a reproduction of the Biblical story of Samuel's conception by Hannah (I Kings, 1-2:21), Catholic theologians concede that from a scholarly viewpoint the life and even the name of Jesus' must remain in doubt.

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