Anna

Saint Anna the Righteous is, according to the tradition of the Church, the mother of the Most Holy Theotokos, the wife of Saint Joachim and the maternal grandmother of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Orthodox Church calls her, with Joachim, a forefather of God. Her name does not appear in the four Gospels but in early tradition, above all in the Protoevangelium of James, written around the middle of the second century. This writing is not part of Scripture, but the Church has kept from it what it says of the parents of the Mother of God.

Her family and her prayer for a child

According to tradition, Anna was the daughter of the priest Matthan, of Bethlehem. She was of the tribe of Levi on her father's side and of the tribe of Judah on her mother's. She had a sister, Sobe, the mother of Elizabeth. She married Joachim, who came from Galilee, and they lived at Nazareth.

For many years, fifty according to the tradition, they had no children. When the high priest turned Joachim's offering away, saying that he had left no offspring in Israel, he withdrew into the wilderness. An angel appeared first to him and then to Anna, who was praying in her garden, and announced that they would have a daughter blessed by all mankind. Anna promised to give the child to God. The story resembles that of Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, in the Old Testament. Saint John of Damascus teaches that Anna married only once.

The birth of the Virgin Mary

Saint Anna gave birth to the Most Holy Virgin Mary. Her parents brought her to the Temple at the age of three, as they had vowed. The account says that the little girl climbed the steps of the Temple alone, to the astonishment of all, and was received there by the priest Zechariah. The Mother of God remained in the Temple until she was betrothed to Joseph.

According to Orthodox tradition, Joachim fell asleep a few years later, at the age of eighty, and Anna fell asleep in peace at seventy-⁠nine, after two more years spent beside the Temple with her daughter. The place of burial is said to be near Gethsemane, close to the future tomb of the Mother of God. The Church holds up her motherly love and faithfulness as an example for parents.

Veneration

Veneration of Saint Anna is very old. The emperor Justinian built a church in her honour in Constantinople around 550. By the middle of the seventh century the Conception of Saint Anna was already kept at the monastery of Saint Sabas. Saint Andrew of Crete left a homily on the Nativity of the Theotokos that shaped the tradition about her.

The Orthodox Church commemorates her on 25 July, her Dormition, on 9 September together with Joachim, the day after the Nativity of the Theotokos, and on 9 December, the Conception by Saint Anna. Icons of the Conception show the Mother of God painted above, with her feet on a globe wound by a serpent. Anna is invoked as protector of mothers, of expectant women and of families. The West keeps her memory on 26 July.

Relics

Her relics are said to have been brought from the Holy Land to Constantinople in 710 and kept in Hagia Sophia until 1333. A part of them is kept today on Mount Athos and in the city of Katerini in Greece. In the West her veneration spread much later, mostly from the thirteenth century, and shrines were raised at Sainte-⁠Anne-⁠d'Auray in Brittany and at Sainte-⁠Anne-⁠de-⁠Beaupré near Quebec.