I read recently that the Church has celebrated the 400th anniversary of the apparitions of St Anne, the mother of Our Lady, in France. I had never heard of these apparitions. What can you tell me about them?
It is true that St Anne appeared in 1624 in a little hamlet called Keranna, or village of Anne, with about fifty inhabitants, in Brittany. Today it is Sainte-Anne-d’Auray, and it is the third most popular pilgrimage site in France, after Lourdes and Lisieux.
When the Bretons became Christian in the early centuries of the Church, they dedicated a chapel to St Anne in that place. The chapel was destroyed around the year 700, but the memory of it was kept alive by tradition.
Nine centuries later, in 1624, St Anne appeared to a farmer named Yvon Nicolazic, an upright, honest and hardworking man. He was a man of peace and his wisdom was often called upon to resolve conflicts between the people of the village. He was also known for his piety and his special devotion to St Anne, whom he called his “benevolent patroness.” He often received Holy Communion, which was rare at that time, and he went regularly to confession to the Capuchin friars in Auray. He was, in this sense, a good Christian, who lived the beatitudes with simplicity and confided in God and in “Madame Sainte Anne.”
At the time of the apparitions Yvon was thirty years old. He had been married for almost ten years to Guillemette Le Roux, but they had not been able to have children. One of his fields was called the Bocenno and, according to the tradition, there had been a chapel dedicated to St Anne on it many centuries before. The field in his day seemed to be blessed in that the harvests were plentiful and it was not necessary to let it lie fallow from time to time, as with other fields. Strangely, oxen always refused to pull the plow there, so that work had to be done by hand.
One summer evening in 1623 Yvon was praying to his “benevolent mother” when suddenly the room was lit up as by a torch. The phenomenon was repeated several weeks later. These were obviously signs from God to prepare Yvon for the apparitions of St Anne to come later. The first apparition took place at the town fountain in August 1623. After work, Yvon was leading his oxen to water along with his brother-in-law, when he saw a majestic lady, radiant with light and smiling, although she did not speak. The following month the lady appeared to him many times, at the fountain, at his home, or on the road to Pluneret near a cross, later called “Nicolazic’s cross.”
At the request of his priest, Yvon asked the lady her name. She revealed herself on the night of 25 July 1624, saying: “Yvon Nicolazic, fear not; I am Anne, Mother of Mary, tell your priest that there was once in the piece of land called the Bocenno, even before the village, a chapel, an earlier one dedicated to me in the country of the Bretons. Today it has been in ruins for nine hundred and twenty-four years and six months. I want it to be rebuilt as soon as possible, and I want you personally to attend to it. It is God’s wish that I be honoured here.”
St Anne also revealed the location of a statue buried in his field. On 7 March 1625 Yvon found the statue amidst the remains of the original chapel. Around 1630 the bishop of Vannes gave permission for a new chapel to be built on the site. King Louis XIII and his wife Queen Anne enriched it with many gifts, including a relic of St Anne brought from Jerusalem in the thirteenth century. Pilgrimages soon began and they became more numerous year after year. They continued even after the French Revolution in 1789, when the chapel was plundered and the Carmelites, who attended it, were driven out. The statue of St Anne was burned in 1793.
In 1866 Cardinal Saint Marc blessed the first stone of the present neo-Gothic basilica, and in 1868 a new statue of St Anne was solemnly blessed by order of Pope Pius IX. Pope St John Paul II visited the shrine in 1996, and every year on 26 July, the feast of Saints Joaquin and Anne, there is a pilgrimage followed by picnics, dancing and entertainment.