Novena to St. Anne

Anne is venerated by ancient and constant Christian tradition as the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the grandmother of Jesus, though her name does not appear in the canonical Gospels. The tradition naming her and her husband Joachim, and recounting a long childless marriage before Mary's birth, comes down from the Protoevangelium of James, an early apocryphal text written well before the fourth century; the Church has never treated its narrative details as certain history, but devotion to Anne as Mary's mother is itself extremely old, attested in the Eastern Church by at least the sixth century and universal in the West by the late Middle Ages. She is honored above all as the pattern of a mother who raised a daughter in faith, and, by long extension, as patroness of mothers, grandmothers, and the ordinary work of a household.

The core tradition (Anne and Joachim as Mary's parents, a marriage marked by long childlessness before Mary's birth) derives from the Protoevangelium of James, an apocryphal but ancient text; details beyond what is recorded there are not claimed as verified history. General veneration history drawn from standard, widely corroborated reference material on the devotion's antiquity and spread.