It is most appropriate that we should speak about St. Anne on this tour. St. Anne is the patron saint of Canada and we will be visiting the Shrine of Saint Anne-de-Beaupré.

If you would like an authentic fact-filled biography of St. Anne, then I am going to disappoint you. What we know with certitude about St. Anne’s life would take me no more than two minutes to impart to you. We know that Mary, the Mother of Christ, was immaculately conceived, a doctrine of our faith solemnly defined in 1854, and this implies that she must have had parents and that the person she knew as her mother could have been called Anne. That’s about it.

But there is another kind of knowledge which plays a role in enriching the devotional lives of Catholics. It is based on pious narratives - some might even call them legends - which frequently can be traced back to the earliest days of the Church. Keep in mind that we are speaking about an era many centuries before the arrival of the printed word. These narratives or stories were often the attempt of the early Christians to provide themselves with a place in history, something like a family tree, if you will. Then the most satisfying stories found a somewhat permanent place in the folk traditions of the community. Providing Mary with parents was almost inevitable when one realizes that we are dealing with a people where ancestry is all important because of the tribal nature of society at that time. You are aware that the Evangelists Luke and Matthew position Christ in the tapestry of history not by the calendar but by providing us with genealogies. Christ, we are told, was of the tribe of David and this provided us with the reason why Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem to fulfill the requirements of the Roman census. Very simply, Bethlehem was David’s city.

In the course of time these oral traditions were put in writing and they took on a more permanent form. The advantage of this new departure lies in the fact that if we have reliable copies of such documents and if we can date them with some accuracy, then we know the exact content of the traditions for a particular group of people at a given point in time. As oral traditions tend to change with every generation of storytellers we must never be surprised that as the Christian communities spread across the Mediterranean world variations in the stories occurred even when their substance remained the same.

Before I leave this explanation I feel it necessary to stress one other important point. We can never underestimate the contribution of the living faith of the people to the acceptance and the growth of these traditions. One cannot quantify the intangible and it is entirely likely that God, in his providence, may have encouraged his prayerful people to construct a positive fabric of human relationships around the incarnate life of his son. After all, it is our teaching that he selected Mary to be the mother of our Savior.

You may recall that immediately after the Second Vatican Council there was a movement to de-emphasize, others might say debunk, popular devotions. Their value was questioned. Statues were removed from sanctuaries, novenas were discontinued, Stations of the Cross were limited to the season of Lent and Marian devotions, including the Rosary, were sidelined. Let me stress that this was not done in bad faith. Two reasons are worth mentioning. One was very positive, namely, the new emphasis on the core values of our spirituality and community worship, especially the Mass and the Sacraments. Any devotional practice which was not intimately linked with these very necessary ingredients of our faith life were, maybe without thinking, relegated to the sidelines and gradually neglected. The other reason may have been a mistake: in a genuine effort to emphasize what we may call the doctrinal and intellectual centrality of the Mass and the Sacraments, what resulted was a tendency to underestimate the emotional needs of the believer in the field of popular devotions. The Council Fathers and those who were their personal peritii (experts), and those who wrote about the Council, were all highly-educated, for the most part, men, and their daily deliberations were aimed at updating the Church to ensure its validity and the relevance of its message to the modern world which had sold its soul to the empiricism of the sciences. Although popular devotions are mentioned in the CONSTITUTION ON THE SACRED LITURGY (1963) the context consigns them to a secondary place. For example, in a document called for by the same CONSTITUTION, when competent musical experts decided that some musical pieces may not be suitable for the new liturgy, it was suggested that maybe they could "be profitably transferred to popular devotions." (Vat. II, S.C.R., Musiciam Sacram, 1967, #53.) References such as these were not perceived as a ringing endorsement of popular devotions and some years later, when Rome learned of these perceptions and the negative results which followed in their wake, the Holy Father gave a talk which could be construed as a corrective message placing strong emphasis on the value of popular devotions and their role in nurturing the spiritual life of the Church. (Ad Limina Talk of Pope John Paul II to the Bishops of Abruzzo and Molise, May 12, 1986) The Holy Father concluded his remarks by observing, "it could be affirmed that in the lives of the faithful and of the Christian communities there is and there should be a place for forms of piety that do not strictly come under the category of liturgical celebration.". . . . and . . . "an authentic liturgical ministry will never be able to neglect the riches of popular piety, the values proper to a culture of a people, so that such riches be illuminated, purified and introduced into the liturgy as an offering of the people." . . . and . . . "I encourage you in this effort to make popular piety become a kind of teaching through which the Christian people can attain to an ever more conscious, active and fruitful participation in the liturgy of the Church."

Now let’s get back to St. Anne. What we know about her, factually or otherwise, is largely based on two apocryphal writings. In modern English the word "apocryphal" has many meanings, some of them extremely negative, but for our purposes here we can say that these writings are non-canonical, that is, not accepted by the Church as authentic or not conforming to the authoritative canons or rules of the Church when it judges sacred documents. This does not automatically mean that they are false. It just means that they do not enjoy the endorsement of the Church and, therefore, for good or ill, they stand on their own, subject to all the rigors of historical research and scholarship. It follows that all of them are in a suspect class but some of them may be more reliable than others.

The first of these, a second century document, is known as the PROTOEVANGELIUM JACOBI, or, in the vernacular, THE GOSPEL OF JAMES. This manuscript sets out to tell us about Mary’s infancy and it has had an enormous impact on the development of devotion to Mary.

A second document , probably less important than the first, is known as the EVANGELIUM DE NATIVITATE MARIAE or THE GOSPEL OF THE NATIVITY OF MARY and it dates back to about the third century.

Anne, whose name in Hebrew is Hannah, was born in either Jerusalem or Bethlehem. She married Joachim and they lived in Nazareth. As they grew older both lamented their childlessness. Joachim, we are told, went into the desert to beg God’s blessing on their marriage. An angel assured him that he would become a father and he hurried back to Nazareth. In the meantime, his wife Anne was also imploring God for a child and she promised that if she had a child she would dedicate it to the Lord’s service. An angel gave her the assurance that her prayers would be answered.

The subsequent joyous meeting of husband and wife is represented in art and the Latin world "osculum" is used to indicate the intimacy of the occasion. The word "osculum" means a kiss or an embrace and probably the best known iconography of the event is that of the famous sixteenth century German engraver, Albrecht Dürer. It is entitled, "The Embrace of Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate" and it is part of the Carrett Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), born in Nurenberg, Germany was a painter, a graphic artist and a humanist. He visited Venice twice and was considerably influenced by the Italian Renaissance. A deeply religious man but one inflicted by chronic illnesses, his paintings and engravings reflect these qualities of his personality. With the discovery of printing many of his woodcuts were reproduced as prints.

True to her promise Anne presented Mary at the Temple when the child was three years old and the future mother of the Savior was reared in the Temple precincts. This event was the genesis of the liturgical feast of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary, which probably began in the East, most likely in Jerusalem, and through the leadership of Pope Sixtus V it was formally instituted in the West in 1585. This feast day is celebrated on November 21.

The Protoevangelium also became the basis for at least two other Marian feasts. One is the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin on September 8 and, in a remote way, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the patronal feast of the United States, which is a December 8^th Holyday of Obligation.

Scripture scholars have noted that there is a district similarity between the extraordinary nature of Hannah’s conception of Samuel (see 1 Sam.1) and the story of Joachim and Anne.

There is a tradition that Joachim died and Anne remarried. Indeed, the theologian Joann Eck speculates that through her second marriage Anne may have become the grandmother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee, along with Simon, Jude and the other James, identified as the son of Alphaeus. I’m afraid such conjecture will always remain in the category of speculation.

In recent years St. Anne has become the focus of the relatively new field of feminist studies. Scholars have noticed that Anne, especially in the medieval period, exercised an influence in society far beyond the domestic sphere which was thought to be the only domain of women. Although she is frequently associated with what we would call traditional "women’s work," her cult extends far beyond this area as she also plays a considerable role in her relationship to men and to the things men do. Art critics point to those depictions known as the Holy Kinship representations where Anne is shown as the leader or matriarch along with her three daughters and their many children. In the absence of Joachim or, for that matter, any other adult male, it is implied that Anne is the founding parent of the nucleus of the first Christian Community if we keep in mind the belief that from her daughters came not only Christ but also most of the apostles.

The development of a cult in honor of any given saint frequently depends on the location of the saint’s relics. This was particularly true in the Middle Ages when the Crusaders returned from the Middle East with an array of items supposedly associated with the saints of the early church and, in many cases, the body parts of the saints themselves. These were presented, often with great pomp and circumstance, to cathedrals, abbeys and monasteries for both public veneration and safe-keeping. At times an intensive rivalry existed between the beneficiaries of these artifacts and there are many tales of raiding-parties stealing relics from one church for the benefit of another. This kind of behavior seems totally alien to our thinking today but we must be careful to be judgmental in keeping with an understanding of what life was like in those centuries. Faith was often interlaced with superstition and in times of war, famine and devastating epidemics of mysterious diseases having the relics of some famous saint in one’s local sanctuary was a source of security and a guarantee of divine protection. In the days before miracle medicines the blessing by a relic was often the only source of hope for families confronted by cholera, smallpox and a myriad of other wasting diseases. These customs may not be as conspicuous today but they are still in use. All over Europe Catholic communities still hold processions, often called Pattern Days, when their local saints are honored in liturgies, songs, music and festivals. Savvy promoters of the local economy will frequently package them as lucrative tourist attractions. And, despite the skills of our modern doctors and the efficacy of surgical procedures and wonder drugs you will often find those tiny reliquaries close to the hospital bed if not pinned to the patient. We should not be surprised by this. It is of our nature to cover all the bases in the strong belief that the healing arts are bolstered by divine intervention, more so than ever, of course, when the prognosis slips from hopeful to fearful.

Are there genuine relics of St. Anne? It is possible that the Crusaders did return with some items which could be classed as closely associated with the saint but it is also possible that many of the items are spurious. This raises the question as to whether or not the authentication of the items is necessary when it comes to the nourishment of faith or the maintenance of a pious tradition. Let me give you a few examples which will convince you that a certain amount of skepticism is necessary when talking about the influence of relics in the medieval period.

The Cathedral of Apt in France claims to house the "veil of St. Anne" and this is why it is a noted place of pilgrimage. When the Count of Blois returned from the Fourth Crusade he presented what was purported to be the head of St. Anne to Chartres Cathedral. One of the clerics at the Cathedral which is dedicated to the Blessed Mother wrote at the time, "the head of the mother was received with great joy in the church of the daughter." Now this is where it becomes difficult and why I am qualifying my language very deliberately. The Dominicans at Mainz also claimed to have a head of Sr. Anne until the early sixteenth century when it was stolen by a stonemason who, in turn, gave it to the Franciscans near Aachen who, with its presence, cultivated another pilgrimage site. These multiple claims relating to an indivisible component of the human body strain our credulity and convince us that we should be wary of all stories connected with the trafficking of relics. The exact location of St. Anne’s skull is probably unknown to all but God. The one positive value to be gleaned from all this discussion is the respect and devotion our people have for the saints and the powers of intercession they associate with their closeness to God. We all like to have friends in high places!

The cult of Anne spread rapidly and extensively during the Middle Ages after it was introduced into Europe. She became a great favorite and was especially honored in France. She is the patron saint of Brittany and it is therefore easy to understand why this devotion was also established in French-speaking Canada. Along the way she was hailed as the protector and intercessor for a number of the challenges and troubles which God’s people have inherited in this vale of tears. She is the patron of women in labor, childless women, expectant mothers, homemakers and believe it or not, cemeteries. In some countries she is invoked by women looking for a husband with special reference to those who, using our modern phrase, are afraid that their biological clock is running out. A lady once shared with me the following little prayer to which she attached great efficacy.

Anne is also revered as a patroness of the sick and tridiuums of healing are held in her honor on and around her feast day which is celebrated in the Western Church on July 26 and in the Eastern Church one day earlier. I spent many happy years in residence in Washington, DC in a parish dedicated to Saint Anne. Monsignor William Awalt, the pastor at the time (and whom many of you know) asked me to compose a prayer to Saint Anne with special reference to her power as an intercessor for healing and sickness. If you are so interested, you will find it in the Appendix.

Martin Luther attacked the cult of St. Anne with such vehemence that his polemics resulted in the opposite effect. People, often with support from Rome, revered her more than ever.

Strange as it may seem and despite the fact that they were husband and wife, the cult of Joachim was much slower in finding a foothold in the Western world. You may recall that in nineteenth century England, Queen Victoria, obviously queen in her own right, dominated public life. Her consort, Albert, rarely made the headlines. The analogy may not be the best but something similar happened here. My home diocese of Cork and Ross in Ireland has a SS. Joachim and Anne Asylum but you will not find the linkage too often. This is all the more significant when one considers that again in the Middle Ages the faithful had a great devotion to the couple as a model of conjugal love, in this regard being more comfortable in going to Joachim and Anne rather than Mary and Joseph, in whose conjugal relations they sensed an entirely different dimension. The concept of the extended family - grandparents, parents and children, three and sometimes four generations, was strong in populations where mobility was minimal and this tended to strengthen the cult of Joachim and Anne in addition to reverence for the Holy Family. As a sidebar let me add that the constant movement of family units allied with the prevalence of divorce and a pervasive abortion mentality shows how badly we need models for stable Christ-centered marriages. In the Council document, "The Church in the Modern World," (52) it is clearly stated that the family is the foundation of all society and all generations must cooperate with each other for the good of the family unit and the welfare of the wider society.

St. Anne has an extensive and honored place in Christian iconography. In the early centuries Anne is represented most often after Jesus and Mary. In the Middle Ages one can find numerous depictions of the three generations, Anne, Mary and the Holy Child. Naturally a number of painters represent her as a woman, somewhat matronly, in the clothing of their time and nationality. At times, but not always, Joachim is also included and occasionally he carries two turtle doves, the offering used at Mary’s presentation in the Temple.

El Greco’s "Holy Family" which includes St. Anne may be seen in the Cleveland Museum of Art. "St. Anne teaching the Virgin" was a favorite topic. There is one by Pinturicchio in the Church of St. Onofrio in Rome: another by Murillo in the Prado Gallery in Madrid. In the Louvre in Paris there is a "Virgin and Child with St. Anne" by Leonardo da Vinchi and his students. It is easy to locate paintings depicting the Presentation, the Death and the Glorification of Anne. And not only paintings, there are reliquaries, gilded statues, mosaics and murals and even pottery in cathedrals, shrines and galleries worldwide but predominantly in Europe.

Selecting a sacred place to worship God and dedicating it to one of his saints is evidence of a living devotion to that saint as an intercessor and protector of both pilgrim and parishioner. Worldwide I would surmise that there are very few dioceses without a church or chapel named in honor of St. Anne. In her book "St. Anne, Grandmother of our Savior," Frances Parkinson Keyes concluded that in the United States alone there are over 400 Catholic churches dedicated to St. Anne. I should add that the title is also well represented among Episcopal churches. Of special interest to all of us on this trip which covers part of New England and part of Canada is the fact that the shrine of St. Anne on Ile La Motte in Lake Champlain marks not only the site of the first Mass said in New England, but of the first settlement (1666) of what is now Vermont.

Of the hundreds of St. Annes available I want to say a few words about four significant ones.

One can find St. Anne’s Church in Jerusalem in the traditional Muslim Quarter of the city and very close to St. Stephen’s Gate. The area in which it is located has a long and rich biblical history. In the vicinity are the ruins of medicinal baths where followers of the god Serapis bathed in their quest for healing. Jesus came here and in the fifth chapter of John’s gospel (5:1-13) we have a description of how he healed a man with a 38 year old illness. John tells us the name of the place was Bethesda, which, appropriately, may mean "House of Mercy." Visitors consider St. Anne’s to be the most beautiful church within the city of Jerusalem and, according to Byzantine tradition, its crypt marks the home of Mary and her parents, Joachim and Anne. It may well be that the location of this church, with its association to the documented miracle of healing performed by Jesus, gave rise to the veneration of St. Anne as a patroness of the sick.

St. Anne is the patron saint of Brittany and one of the largest shrines in her honor is located in Auray southeast of Brest. Like a great deal associated with this saint there is an extraordinary event connected with its beginnings. In 1623 a Breton peasant, Yves Nicolazic, claimed that St. Anne had appeared to him in a vision and asked him to have a church built in her honor in a certain place. She maintained that a chapel of the kind she requested had existed in the same location nearly a thousand years earlier. Nobody took this story seriously and Nicolazic was roundly ridiculed. Everything changed rather abruptly when a primitive statue of the saint, although badly damaged, was unearthed on the property the visionary had suggested as a possible site for the church. Money poured in, a chapel was built and the Carmelites took charge of the new shrine. Much was destroyed in the French Revolution and the unusual statue was further damaged. In the mid 1900s, when the full fury of the revolution had moderated, work began again. A great basilica now stands in the area which Nicolazic had selected and it also houses his tomb. The mysterious statue, in all its fragility, is still enshrined there and it is the object of great devotion at the annual festival which marks the feast day of St. Anne on July 26 each year.

Just as legendry lore becomes the fabric of St. Anne’s biography so, too, the story surrounding the coming to be of the basilica of Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré is shrouded in a misty history. It is said that some French sailors encountered a severe storm on the St. Lawrence River during the 1650s and they prayed to their patroness, St. Anne, to save them. Their lives were spared and in thanksgiving they built a small wooden chapel on the north shore of the river. Almost immediately the place became associated with extraordinary cures, many of which are documented. Today, over a million pilgrims a year visit the shrine. The original chapel and a number of its successors have disappeared, the victims of floods and fires. A large church built in 1887 burned in 1926. The current basilica, which has its critics from an architectural point of view, is hardly likely to burn as it is constructed throughout of granite, marble and mosaics in what is classified as a neo-Romanesque style. Over the years the growing deposit of crutches and even artificial limbs testifies to the gratitude of pilgrims who have reason to believe that their faith brought healing. We know, of course, that most miracles of grace are known only to the recipient.

The city of Rome is so dominated by major basilicas and spacious churches that the smaller ones almost go unnoticed. Many of the latter are gems of architecture and of considerable historical significance. Most pilgrims to the Eternal City are therefore surprised, that is, if they discover the fact, that the parish church of the entire Vatican City State is dedicated to St. Anne. Keep in mind that this sovereign state, the smallest in the world, has an area of only 107 acres and its population is usually numbered between 500 and 1000 people. As one faces St. Peter’s from the Square it is rather easy to locate St. Anne’s Church outside the Colonnade on one’s right hand side. It is very close to the Via di Porta Angelica in close proximity to the Barracks of the Swiss Guards. The official name of this parish Church is Santa Anna dei Palafrenieri. The Palafrenieri were the Papal Grooms and they were responsible for the building of this, relatively speaking, small church to the design of Vignola. Giacomo Da Vignola (1507-73) had an extraordinary influence on post Reformation church architecture which can be traced to this day throughout the Catholic world. He designed a number of palaces for his wealthy patrons and in Rome the church dedicated to St. Andrew on the Via Flaminia and the Jesuit church known as the Gesü, were largely his creations. He is remembered today, if at all, by the fact that he was selected to succeed Michelangelo as the principal architect of St. Peter’s. He was not afraid to try out new ideas and his design for the interior of St. Anne’s, basically an oval shape, probably raised some eyebrows when the building of the church began in 1572.

Let me conclude with a few words from Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400), the English poet whose most popular work still remains The Canterbury Tales. As many of you are aware, it is a series of short stories narrated by the various participants on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. It is, of course, written in Old English which, except for those who have studied it, bears little resemblance to what we would today call the Queen’s English. In one of the Tales there is a prayer seeking the spiritual help of Mary, the Mother of Christ. What makes it interesting for our purposes is that in this medieval poem Mary is identified as the child of Anne. I cannot use the word "translation" because I am going from English to English but what follows is my own very free and very liberal rendition of that prayer.

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