Detroit — It was 1950s Dunkirk, N.Y., and Ronald Pangborn’s mother had already lost two infants.

“She made a vow to St. Anne that if her next child lived, she would do a pilgrimage to her,” said Pangborn, a technical specialist with the Archdiocese of Detroit’s Catholic Television Network of Detroit (CTND).

The prayers of St. Anne, the mother of Our Lady and grandmother of Jesus, are frequently invoked for intentions of fertility and childbearing, as tradition holds that St. Anne and her husband, St. Joachim, struggled with infertility before Mary’s birth.

Pangborn’s mother and grandmother asked for St. Anne’s intercession, and a year and a day after the loss of the second infant, “I was born, and I did make it,” said Pangborn.

True to her word, Pangborn’s mother decided to take the family to the Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre, located 20 miles from Quebec City in Canada, for the saint’s July 26 feast day.

It soon became a tradition that was repeated every two summers during Pangborn’s childhood, as the family piled into the car and drove up to Quebec.

Pangborn described the pilgrimage as “the sort of trip that people joke about now, you know … you put Grandma and Grandpa and one of the uncles who sleeps all the time in the station wagon, and my sister and I would sit in the seat that faced the opposite way.”

“We would take these incredibly long driving trips,” Pangborn said, adding that the weather was like Michigan weather — “unbearably hot and humid.”

Pangborn remembers the devotion of his mother and grandmother as they took “the Schola Sancta — the ‘sacred steps,’ and you would climb up these steps on your knees … it was really wide, and it led up to this beautiful altar. It was really, really amazing.”

Pangborn said he still has the image in his mind of his mother and grandmother going up the stairs, seeing numerous crutches and wheelchairs from people who had been healed, and attending “amazing” Masses with “the big candle procession like at Lourdes.”

He also remembers tiny, one-decade rosaries that his mother and grandmother kept — he had one too, as a child — with a medal of St. Anne attached, as well as many “pictures of St. Anne in my mother’s house and in my grandmother’s house.”

“This was just a regular part of my growing up,” he said.

Pangborn said the closeness with Jesus’s grandmother trickled down to him as he grew up around his mother’s Polish family with his Polish grandmother.

“I loved my grandmother, and this idea of Jesus’s grandmother just seemed like the coolest thing,” he said.

As an adult, Pangborn said he is deeply impacted by his mother’s vow to St. Anne “that if I lived she would do this, and she actually did. That, I think, is pretty astounding.”

He said his mother’s expression of faith has deeply influenced his own spiritual walk and his involvement and relationship with Jesus.

“My mother was looking for a drastic change,” he said. “She wanted a miracle. And incredibly enough, I was that miracle.”

 

Local Ste. Anne celebrations

Ecumenical service Join Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron and Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Nicholas on the eve of the feast of Ste. Anne for an ecumenical Vespers service at 7 p.m. July 25 at the Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament, 9844 Woodward Ave., Detroit, 48202.

Ste. Anne de Detroit feast Archbishop Vigneron will celebrate Mass for the feast of Ste. Anne, patroness of Detroit, at 7 p.m. July 26 at Ste. Anne de Detroit Parish, 1000 Ste. Anne St., Detroit, 48216.