Sts. Joachim and Anne

Summary

Podcast Summary: Catholic Saints – Sts. Joachim and Anne

Introduction

In the episode titled "Sts. Joachim and Anne," released on July 26, 2025, the Augustine Institute delves into the lives of Saints Joachim and Anne, the grandparents of Jesus. Hosted by Mary McGeehan and featuring insights from Dr. Carl Venustrom, a professor at the Augustine Institute, the discussion aims to illuminate the historical and spiritual significance of these revered figures within Catholic tradition.

Who Are Saints Joachim and Anne?

Mary McGeehan opens the conversation by introducing Saints Joachim and Anne as the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary, thereby positioning them as the grandparents of Jesus Christ.

Mary McGeehan [00:54]: "We are diving into another episode of Catholic Saints, where we're looking at the saints for inspiration for our lives, looking to them for wisdom and inspiration for holiness today. So today we're going to talk about saints Joachim and Anne."

Dr. Carl Venustrom elaborates on their identities, emphasizing that while they do not appear in the New Testament, their story is foundational in Catholic tradition.

Dr. Carl Venustrom [01:02]: "These are the grandparents of Jesus. So the parents of Mary."

Sources of Information and Traditions

The primary source of information about Joachim and Anne is the Protoevangelium of James, an early Christian document attributed to James, the cousin of Jesus. Written in the second century, this text provides a detailed account of their marriage, struggles with infertility, and the miraculous birth of Mary.

Dr. Carl Venustrom [01:03]: "Their sort of first appearance in the tradition of the Church is in a document called the Proto Evangelium of James."

Dr. Venustrom highlights the parallels between Joachim and Anne's story and Old Testament narratives, particularly the story of Hannah and Samuel.

Dr. Carl Venustrom [02:43]: "The basic story surrounding Joachim and Ann is familiar from the Old Testament in a lot of ways... there's the story of Joachim and Anne, the inability to produce a child, so there's an infertility. That's this problem in their family."

Significance in Catholic Doctrine

A significant aspect of their story is the vow Joachim and Anne make to dedicate their child to God's service, mirroring Hannah's dedication of Samuel. This vow underscores themes of sacrifice and divine purpose.

Dr. Carl Venustrom [03:48]: "Their marriage was 20 years without any children. And so they both sort of offered to God that if they're able to have a child, that they will offer this child in service of God, just like Hannah promises to offer her child, who ends up being Samuel, to the service of God."

The episode also touches upon the doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, explaining how Mary's upbringing in the temple and her lifelong virginity are portrayed in tradition.

Dr. Carl Venustrom [06:33]: "This is also where we kind of get the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary."

Artistic Depictions and Symbolism

The discussion transitions to how Joachim and Anne are represented in Christian art, with particular reference to the works of the medieval artist Giotto. These depictions often draw parallels between events in the lives of Joachim and Anne and those of Mary and Elizabeth, emphasizing themes of divine intervention and blessing.

Dr. Carl Venustrom [13:08]: "There's the scene when they meet at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem... depicted by an artist named Giotto, who's a medieval artist."

The artistic representations, such as the kiss between Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate, symbolize the sacred union and divine favor, mirroring the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth in the New Testament.

Dr. Carl Venustrom [14:20]: "There's this kiss between them, which parallels like the greeting of Mary and Elizabeth."

Legacy and Patronage

Saints Joachim and Anne hold significant patronage roles within the Catholic Church. They are recognized as the patrons of grandparents, unmarried women, housewives, women in labor, mothers, and childless couples. Their story serves as a source of inspiration for believers facing similar struggles or seeking guidance in their familial and spiritual lives.

Mary McGeehan [15:55]: "Saints Joachim and Anne. Pray for us."

Reflections and Conclusions

The episode concludes with a reflection on the profound sacrifice Joachim and Anne made by dedicating their only child to God's service, transforming their personal joy into a cornerstone of salvation history. This narrative encourages listeners to view their own sacrifices within the broader context of divine purpose and communal salvation.

Dr. Carl Venustrom [16:23]: "If you think of only within sort of their own story, like the arc is toward the final accomplishment of this goal or this wish and it being fulfilled to have this child, but it's part of this much larger story."

Mary McGeehan and Dr. Venustrom emphasize the importance of understanding these saints within the unity of sacred tradition, rather than isolating their stories. This approach fosters a deeper appreciation of their roles in the faith and encourages the faithful to draw inspiration from their virtues and sacrifices.

Conclusion

This episode of "Catholic Saints" provides a comprehensive exploration of Saints Joachim and Anne, blending historical context, theological insights, and artistic interpretations to present a rich portrayal of these pivotal figures in Catholic tradition. By examining their lives, vows, and enduring legacy, Mary McGeehan and Dr. Carl Venustrom offer listeners a nuanced understanding of how these saints continue to inspire and guide the faithful today.

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Notable Quotes:

• Mary McGeehan [00:54]: "Looking to them for wisdom and inspiration for holiness today."
• Dr. Carl Venustrom [01:03]: "Their sort of first appearance in the tradition of the Church is in a document called the Proto Evangelium of James."
• Mary McGeehan [05:11]: "Was it, we know, in the life of Jesus, Joseph and Mary presented Jesus. The presentation in the temple."
• Dr. Carl Venustrom [16:23]: "Their own story becomes instrumental in salvation history."

Transcript

[Narrator]

You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

[Mary McGeehan]

Hi. Welcome to Catholic Saints. My name is Mary McGeehan, and I am joined with Dr. Carl Venustrom, professor here at the Gus Institute. Thanks for joining.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Very glad to be here.

[Mary McGeehan]

We are diving into another episode of Catholic Saints, where we're looking at the saints for inspiration for our lives, looking to them for wisdom and inspiration for holiness today. So today we're going to talk about saints Joachim and Anne. Their feast day is on July 26. What can you tell us about some biographical sketch of who these saints are, what we know about them?

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah, so these are the grandparents of Jesus. So the parents of Mary.

[Mary McGeehan]

Okay, so. Okay.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

The Blessed Virgin. And so we know about them. If you've read the New Testament, you'll know that we don't know about them from the New Testament. Saints Joachim and do not appear in the Gospel narratives, but the. Their sort of first appearance in the tradition of the Church is in a document called the Proto Evangelium of James. So this is supposed to have been written by James, the cousin of Jesus, and it describes their. Their marriage and the circumstances surrounding the birth of Mary, as well as. It's a kind of commentary also on the birth of Jesus and how it happens. So it sort of expands certain points where the Gospels are silent.

[Mary McGeehan]

Okay. This isn't the Apostle James, though. Or is it the person who wrote this?

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah, yeah, that's the. That's who it's traditionally assigned to ascribe to. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. So it is an interesting question because it's probably written in the second century, so it's still very early.

[Mary McGeehan]

Yeah.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

But the ascription to James is kind of loose, maybe. Yeah.

[Mary McGeehan]

Okay.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah.

[Mary McGeehan]

And you think within it is where we get the tradition and what the source of where we know the most about the parents of Blessed Virgin Mary.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

That's right. Yeah. And so the. The basic story surrounding Joachim and Ann is familiar from the Old Testament in a lot of ways. And actually, Ann is a transliteration of a sort of the name Hannah from the Old Testament. Obviously, Hannah is the mother of Samuel. This is an interesting point we can kind of reflect on as we work through this story. But like a lot of Old Testament stories, the story of Joachim and Ann, of the inability to produce a child, so there's an infertility. That's this problem in their family. And at one point. At one point, Joachim, who's A rather wealthy man is going to offer a particular sacrifice in the temple and is told that he's, like the only man in Israel who doesn't have a son. And so this causes him great distress. And he. He goes out into the wilderness and fasts for 40 days. At the same time, Anne is also praying for a child. I think their marriage was 20 years without any children. And so they both sort of offered to God that if they're able to have a child, that they will offer this child in service of God, just like Hannah promises to offer her child, who ends up being Samuel, to the service of God.

[Mary McGeehan]

Interesting.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah. And so then they come back together and there's this realization of their promise to God and their hope and their request. So Anne becomes pregnant and gives birth to Mary. And so then when Mary turns three, they actually present her in the temple. So she's offered to live in the temple, and so she's accompanied by angels all the time and grows in wisdom.

[Mary McGeehan]

Was it, we know, in the life of Jesus, Joseph and Mary presented Jesus. The presentation in the temple. Is that customary even for the female babies in Jewish tradition, or was it in particular within the vocation of Anne and Joachim? It was unique that they presented their child, particularly a young girl.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

A girl, yeah. Yeah. This is unique. And especially the idea of her as, like, a resident in the temple would have been incredibly unusual, but it mirrors in many ways the story of Samuel. Yeah. And there are a lot of interesting parallels between the life of the child Mary and the life of the child Jesus, including, or at least in the sort of infancy narrative. So this scene when Joachim and Ann meet after their prayers to God is often depicted in the sort of artistic tradition of the church in the same way that the visitation when Mary and her cousin Elizabeth meet. So these are parallel events. Like, they're not perfectly parallel. Right. But it's kind of more interesting that they're not perfectly parallel. And then obviously, the presentation of Mary in the temple, her parents sort of offering her as a sacrifice which Joachim had not been able to offer before his sacrifice was refused. So then an ultimate kind of sacrifice is offered by both Joachim and Anne in the person of Mary.

[Mary McGeehan]

Okay.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah.

[Mary McGeehan]

Okay, interesting. And I'm just curious, is it tradition that Mary grew up in the temple?

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah, so she lived there until she was 12. That's how the story goes. Yeah. And then at that point in time, because of temple purity laws, it wasn't possible for her to stay in the temple, so she left. And then she was obviously a very special person. And so she needed to be married, as was customary. But this is also where we kind of get the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary. So her marriage was not, according to this story, ever intended to be a marriage which produced more children or which involves sexual acts. But so she was given by lot to Joseph, who is an elderly man whose wife had died and who had had children. So there's sort of different traditions about Joseph, but this is the one that's handed down in this, in this text.

[Mary McGeehan]

Fascinating. It's also neat how within this tradition, once again, how intentionally God the Father, even divinely, you know, provided so specifically for Jesus's mom and for his grandparents. Just like a very pure and set apart story, you know, that's very unique. Just how intentional God. God's handwriting is in the lineage of Jesus.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. And it in that way really beautifully reflects the whole sort of heritage that leads to Jesus that we get in the Gospel of Matthew and in the genealogies. Those genealogies are pretty straightforward in Matthew, but contained are all these wild stories with these miraculous births and twists and turns and unexpected happenings that lead ultimately to Christ.

[Mary McGeehan]

To Christ. Right. Another question I have is, since the tradition, you know, it's not from Scripture, how, as Catholics, do we take this source of information for truth or, you know, validity or not? Like, how do you categorize this document? And how, as Catholics, do we receive this type of tradition?

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah, this is a good question. And there are, you know, just like with Joachim and Anne, the story itself has sort of twists and turns in the tradition. So, yeah, in the fifth century, there's even a Pope in Rome who speaks like very negatively about this text and says people should reject it, but it was received very enthusiastically by others. And so it's a little difficult. Maybe if you just look at the text itself and maybe sort of look at the historical scholarship that's been applied to it, it's like, okay, so it comes a little later. And obviously it's not scripture. It was never accepted as script itself by anyone. But I think we don't look at the text by itself. We don't look at any sort of like datum in the tradition in a kind of vacuum. And so one way to look at this text would be through like the Church's liturgical tradition.

[Mary McGeehan]

Okay.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

And so we have major Marian feasts in our calendar that ultimately derive from this text. I mean, these feasts derive from sort of the truth of sort of mystery, which is contained in Mary. But the sort of first instance of these teachings comes in this text. So we have the feast of the immaculate conception on December 8, often, or at least sometimes confused for the conception of Jesus. Right. The Immaculate Conception rather refers to the birth of Mary.

[Mary McGeehan]

Always a good Catholic trivia.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah, always a good. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. And so this is the doctrine that. That Mary was conceived without. Without original sin, which was contested. But if you want to look at. If you want to look for this doctrine in sort of like seed form, you can find in the proto evangelium of James, the Nativity of Mary on September 8th. Those go together. December 8th, September 8th. This is @ least the first sort of textual indication of that. And then the presentation of Mary on September 21st. I mean, sorry, November 21st, would also have its origin in this text. And so I think, like, with that kind of in mind, if we're sort of taught the truths of the faith by the church calendar and by these feasts, that we can have a kind of optimism and confidence in this text itself. It's not like itself, a sort of binding document.

[Mary McGeehan]

Right.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

But given those factors, I think it's reasonable to read it with piety and trust, I guess.

[Mary McGeehan]

Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. And in unity with sacred tradition, it's one piece that kind of corroborates the tradition of the church and how have honored Mary and her parents.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And we want to, like, avoid just reading it, but just reading it by itself because then it gets kind of distorted. Like some scholars would say, like, oh, the emphasis on virginity shows that it's from these, like, sort of gnostic or, like, heterodox groups that were outside of the church. And it's like. Well, I guess, like, if you just look at it, like, by itself, without any other context, like. Yeah, it starts to look like kind of bizarre. But I think within the. Yeah, the breadth of tradition, this is a very fruitful.

[Mary McGeehan]

Sure. You also mentioned they're often depicted in sacred or in art. Are there particular pieces or artists that you would recommend? I go look up? And is there anything consistent in the art that we have come to assign as true and likely about Ann and Joachim?

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah. So there's the scene when they meet at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem. I think this is on the west side of Jerusalem of the old walls. And this is depicted by an artist named Giotto, who's a medieval artist, and he did a whole cycle of this kind of life of Mary. And this, the actual tradition itself, or at least the actual text itself, was lost in the west for a long time and was sort of like brought back in the medieval period. And so then the artistic depictions of all these events sort of blossom. So he has that. He has the visitation, he has the. I'm sorry, he has the presentation and the nativity. And these all have interesting sort of artistic parallels to then his depictions of the nativity of Christ or the presentation of Christ in the temple. And so one interesting thing with the meeting at the Golden Gate is that there's this kiss between them, which parallels like the greeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

[Mary McGeehan]

Sweet.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah, yeah. And kind of like I said before, it's like, in a way, it's kind of nice. The parallel's not perfect. Even if we think about, like.

[Mary McGeehan]

It rhymes.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah, it rhymes. Yeah, exactly. And the same thing is true with, like, this thinking about Hannah and Anne, which is just Hannah, the song of Hannah shares. Or I guess it's the opposite. The Mary's Magnificat shares a lot in common with the song of Hannah after the birth of or preceding the birth of Samuel.

[Mary McGeehan]

Samuel.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

But Hannah and Anne are sor. Comparisons. But also Hannah and Mary. So you can think about. Actually, there's a rich way to think about the correspondence of Samuel and Mary with Samuel being the prophet who anoints the king of Israel, David, and then with Mary, whose conception and birth of Christ is kind of an anointing. He emerges as a king Right. From a prophet. So, like, their kinship is even like, obviously much closer than that of Samuel and David. But there is this kind of parallel.

[Mary McGeehan]

Thank you. I wasn't aware of that.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Anyways, that's a little away from the artwork.

[Mary McGeehan]

Scriptural exegesis.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I think this was sort of the first time I thought about that parable because I'd always thought about Hannah and Mary together as a kind of pair. But.

[Mary McGeehan]

Yeah, interesting. Well, we know the saints of Joachim and Anne. They're the patrons of grandparents. And then Anne is the patron saint of unmarried women, housewives, women in labor, mothers, and childless couples. Are there other things or legacy today of these saints that you would recommend or other details about their lives that you'd like to share?

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah. I guess one thing to just reflect on as you think about their story is that there was this thing they had wanted their whole lives, which was. Or their whole marriage, which is to have a child, and that had been denied them. But once they are able to have a child, they immediately. Or after three years, like, I was just talking about my three year old. Like, I'M sure Mary is a better three year old than my three year old. Maybe once you have a three year old you want to give it away to a temple, I don't know. But Dr. Venison's three year old is adorable. No, but it's what they'd wanted for so long and they immediately, they immediately give it up. So if you think of only within sort of their own story, like the arc is toward the final accomplishment of this goal or this wish and it being fulfilled to have this child, but it's part of this much larger story. And so to offer up their own desire and their own wish for their own life becomes instrumental in in salvation history. So I think that's kind of helpful thing to remember with our much smaller sacrifices, often that the small story is a small story and the big story is a big story. So beautiful. Useful to keep in mind.

[Mary McGeehan]

Yeah. No, thank you. That is a beautiful reminder of what they were desiring for so long. And then in the gift and reception of it, they immediately offered it back in service or to the Father and to God. So wonderful. Well, thank you. That was very interesting. If you'd like to see some of the art depicted about Saints Joachim and Anne, we'll add it into the captions so you can visually come to life some of what we shared about today. So thank you so much for joining us.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Yeah, very happy.

[Mary McGeehan]

Saints Joachim and Anne. Pray for us.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Pray for us.

[Mary McGeehan]

Thanks for joining.

[Dr. Carl Venustrom]

Thanks.

[Narrator]

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