Who was St. Anne?
The New Testament never names the mother of Mary. Matthew and Luke trace the ancestry of Jesus, but, as Franciscan Media points out, they say nothing about Mary's own family. Everything the Church says about Anne and her husband Joachim comes from somewhere else, chiefly a second-century text called the Protoevangelium of James. The Catholic Encyclopedia dates its earliest form to about A.D. 150; the Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré says 150 to 200. It is not Scripture. It is apocryphal, and the Encyclopedia is blunt: "we can hardly accept as beyond doubt its various statements on its sole authority." Even the name may be borrowed: Anne is Hannah, the Hebrew word for grace, and the Encyclopedia notes how closely her story follows that of Hannah, the mother of Samuel.
The story is this. Joachim and Anne were pious and well off, and they had no children. When Joachim brought his offering to the Temple, a man named Ruben turned him away: a childless man was unworthy. Joachim went out to the hills to pray. Anne, at home, prayed too, and promised that if God gave her a child she would give the child back to him. An angel came to her and said that the Lord had seen her tears. The same promise was made to Joachim. The child was Mary.
The Eastern Church loved this text and read from it on Mary's feasts; the Western Fathers rejected it, and the Latin Church, except perhaps in southern France, did not venerate Anne before the thirteenth century, when Jacobus de Voragine put her story in the Golden Legend. In the East her cult goes back to the fourth century, and the Emperor Justinian built her a church in the sixth. In the West the feast of July 26 appears in the thirteenth century; Urban VI introduced it in England in 1378, and in 1584 it was extended to the whole Latin Church. Today it is the Memorial of Sts. Joachim and Anne, kept together.
So what do we actually know? The shrine at Beaupré says it plainly: "we know very little about the life of Saint Anne." We know that Mary had a mother, that she was raised in the faith of Israel, and that the family which produced the Mother of God was, as Franciscan Media reasons, a devout and close one. Anne is honored for the fact of her, not for a biography.
Why Catholics pray to St. Anne for a family, a pregnancy and grief
None of Anne's patronages was declared by a pope. The Encyclopedia lists women in labor, miners, Brittany and Quebec; Franciscan Media gives mothers and women in labor, and grandparents for the couple together; the shrine at Beaupré calls her the patron saint of Quebec. All of it is traditional, and most of it comes from the one thing her story is about: a couple who wanted a child, waited, were shamed for it, prayed, and were heard.
That is why the childless pray to her, and women who are pregnant and afraid, and parents who have lost a baby. It is also why grandparents pray to her, and why Franciscan Media calls July 26 "the feast of grandparents": she is the grandmother of Jesus. The grief patronage follows from the pregnancy one. A woman who has buried a child goes to the woman whose whole story is a longed-for child.
The devotion took a particular shape in Canada. French settlers, missionaries and sailors brought it across the Atlantic, and at Beaupré, on the St. Lawrence about 35 kilometers east of Quebec City, a church to St. Anne was built in 1658. The shrine's own prayer for 2026 remembers "the Breton sailors in peril" who called on her. The Redemptorists have served the shrine since 1878. Three relics of St. Anne are kept there: a fragment of a finger bone brought by Bishop François de Laval in 1670, a four-inch piece of her forearm given by Leo XIII in 1892, and a second forearm relic given by John XXIII in 1960, both from the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome. The shrine publishes favors reported through her prayers, and it promises that "the Secretariat of the Shrine will leave your prayer intentions at the foot of the miraculous statue."
How to pray to St. Anne
July 26 is the Memorial of Sts. Joachim and Anne on the General Roman Calendar, so every parish keeps it. The nine days before are the usual time for a novena. Pray to her on any day a pregnancy is on your mind, and on the anniversary of a child you lost.
Say the prayer below and then say the child's name, or the name you would have given. Take the intention to Mass. If grief has become guilt, take it to Confession, where it can be set down.
Two plain things. A pregnancy that worries you needs a doctor as well as a grandmother in heaven; prayer to St. Anne accompanies prenatal care and fertility treatment, it does not stand in for them. And a grief that has gone on and on, that keeps you from sleeping or eating, is a reason to talk to a counselor as well as to pray. Anne waited, but she did not wait alone.