Saints Anne and Joachim

Although they are not mentioned in scripture, tradition remembers the names of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s parents as Saints Joachim and Anne. Today is their feast. This is also the patronal feast of our new parish of St. Ann. May you have all the joy of the feast! Yesterday evening, having just arrived back home after several days hiking and camping, we attended our first Mass at our parish in Vietnamese. What an amazing experience! I think I’ve attended Masses in half a dozen different languages now, and it’s always an eye-opener.

The names of Saints Joachim and Anne are first recorded in the Protoevangelium of James, written probably in the second century. This is one of those works that mix facts with fancy to prove a point, so we must be very careful. Still, the writings of the Fathers tend to confirm the broad strokes, if not the details.

Saint Jerome, while railing against the book’s “absurdities” nevertheless confined his criticism primarily to the depiction of Saint Joseph and his family, and not to that of Mary’s family. So with these caveats in mind, what do we know of Saints Joachim and Anne?

Joachim was said to be wealthy and generous, and Anne is described as a simple and pious woman. They were childless into their middle-age.

Joachim brought his sacrifice to the temple – twice the amount required, for he was a generous man – but the priest Rubim rejected it. It turned out that Joachim alone among the righteous had not fathered a child.

In the great tradition of Jewish prophets, he withdrew to the desert and fasted for forty days. At the end of this time, angels appeared to both Joachim and Anne, promising them that they would have a child.

When Joachim returned to Jerusalem, he met Anne at the city gate, and they embraced. This scene, “Joachim and Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate”, was often depicted in art during the Medieval Era.

They are said to have offered their child Mary to the Temple following her birth. For centuries, this was thought to be apocryphal, the result of some later scribe conflating the Roman Pagan Vestal Virgins with Jewish Temple practice. Recently, however, archaeologists have discovered that a community of women lived on site on the Temple mount, engaged in the work of spinning and weaving. Presumably they were making and repairing the vestments and linens required by the Temple priesthood, an ancient Hebrew Altar Society if you will.

A Digression

So, if I may be permitted a momentary dive down the rabbit hole, today is the feast of Saints Joachim and Anne in the Ordinary Form (OF) of the Roman Rite, as well as in my monastic Breviary. In the Extraordinary Form (EF), these two saints have two different feast days, Anne today and Joachim on August 16. Why?

Normally, the Benedictine calendar reflects an older usage, and so it frequently lines up with the EF calendar on days when the EF and OF calendars differ. It’s a rare thing when it lines up with the more modern OF calendar instead. Today is one of those days.

Anne’s feast day has been on the Roman Calendar since at least 1618. It’s considerably older in the Eastern Rites, dating back to probably the sixth century.

Poor Joachim is not so lucky. He was only added to the calendar in the early nineteenth century, as a simple commemoration on the day of the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15. In 1913, he finally gets his own day, August 16. Here it remains until 1970.

So far as I can tell, in the Roman Rite the two saints never shared a day until 1970. So why does the Benedictine Ordo do so?

I have no idea. I have a monastic ordo from 1771 that actually has both their feasts separately, well ahead of the Roman addition of Joachim. In fact, it has the August 16 date, some 140 years ahead of Rome.

But then the Missal of Cluny¹, published just two years later, omits Saint Joachim entirely.

What are we to make of this? Well, clearly, there is no such thing as a “standard” monastic usage before the nineteenth or twentieth century. Even my 1963 Monastic Diurnal has a whole supplement in the back with “Feasts kept in various places”.

Learned men and women will doubtless wish to correct my simplifications and ignorances on these matters. I welcome it!

There are times when the “standard” (not “universal”!) Benedictine calendar reforms seem to run behind the Roman calendar, and times when it runs ahead. Since the Church seems incapable of anything approaching a universal calendar, I’ll just have to continue keeping up with three different ones.

For a Church that standardized what has become the civil calendar, that just seems weird.

1. Missale monasticum ad usum sacri ordinis Cluniacensis (1733).