Saints Joachim and Anne

Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Feast Day

July 26

The Memorial of Saints Joachim and Anne honors the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the maternal grandparents of Jesus Christ. The names of Joachim and Anne are not given in the canonical Gospels but appear in the second-century Protoevangelium of James, an apocryphal narrative which, while not received into Scripture by the Catholic Church, was respected as an early witness to traditions about Mary's birth and infancy. According to the Protoevangelium, Joachim and Anne were a devout childless couple of Nazareth or Jerusalem who, after long prayer, received the gift of Mary as the answer to their petition; this account underlies the Catholic feast of the Birth of Mary (September 8) and the Eastern feast of her Conception by Anne (December 9 / December 8).

The cultus of Saint Anne is attested at Constantinople by the sixth century, where Justinian I built her a basilica. In the West veneration spread from the Crusades onward, Pope Urban VI extended her feast to England in 1378, Pope Gregory XIII to the universal Latin Church in 1584. Her tradition is especially rich in Brittany (the Pardon of Sainte-Anne-d'Auray, established after her apparition to Yves Nicolazic in 1623) and in French Canada (the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre near Quebec, a major North American pilgrimage site since 1658). Saint Joachim's feast was added to the Roman Calendar by Pope Julius II in the early sixteenth century.

In the post-Vatican II reform of the Calendar, Pope Saint Paul VI joined the two parents in a single Memorial on July 26 (1969), the date previously assigned to Anne. Pope Francis, in 2021, instituted the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly, observed annually on the fourth Sunday of July, near this Memorial, in honor of Joachim and Anne as patrons of the older generations.