Feast day: July 26
Sts. Joachim & Anne
By ancient tradition, the parents of Mary and grandparents of Jesus — honored as the root from which salvation's family tree grew.
Joachim and Anne are honored by the Church as the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary and so the grandparents of Jesus. The Gospels say nothing of them, and their names and story come from an early Christian writing of the second century, the 'Protoevangelium of James' — not Scripture, but a tradition the Church has cherished for its tender portrait of the household into which the Mother of God was born.
By that tradition Joachim and Anne were a devout and prosperous couple of Nazareth who bore a heavy sorrow: they were childless, and grew old without the children that were, in their world, the great sign of God's blessing. They are pictured praying and grieving over their barrenness, never losing faith, until at last, like Abraham and Sarah and the parents of Samuel before them, they were granted in their old age a child — Mary, whom they joyfully dedicated to God.
Whatever the historical details, the Church honors in them the holiness of an ordinary married life and the way the faith is handed down through generations. They form the last link in the long line of patriarchs and ancestors who awaited the Messiah, and the human family that raised and formed the girl who would say 'yes' to God.
Devotion to St. Anne especially became immense in the Middle Ages, and she is invoked as a patron of mothers, of women in childbirth, and of grandmothers, while the two together are honored as the patrons of grandparents and married couples. Their feast, on July 26, has in recent times been joined to a special day of prayer for the elderly and grandparents, in honor of the wisdom and faith passed from age to age.
The Church celebrates the grandparents of Jesus — a feast that quietly canonizes the hidden work of every grandparent.
Image: chanter Angelos Akotandos (1400 - 1457) Details on Google Art Project (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/08406b.htm
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