Saint Anne and Saint Esther, fact, fiction or secret role models for a secret people

The former Chapel of Saint Anne (right) and the Sexton Chapel (left) were amalgamated to form the consistorial court in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

I spent much of yesterday [10 September 2019] in Limerick, at a meeting of the chapter in Saint Mary’s Cathedral in the morning, and at a diocesan working group in the afternoon.

It was interesting to hear in the cathedral later in the day about proposals for the former Chapel of Saint Anne and the Sexton Chapel on the south side of the cathedral.

These chapels together onceserved as the Consistorial Court, and the dividing walls between the two chapels had been removed by the 19th century. Today, they form one space and the area that was once Saint Anne’s Chapel accommodates the welcome desk and the cathedral shop.

An icon of Saint Anne with her child, the Virgin Mary, with her child, the Christ Child, in the Church of Saint Eleftherios and Saint Anna in Corfu (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

In my sermon at the Mothers’ Union service in Saint Mary’s Church, Askeaton, on Monday evening, I shared the old joke beloved by theology students about Saint Anne as ‘Holy Annie, God’s Grannie,’ alongside more serious reflections of the good modelling of parenting Saint Anne could have provided the Virgin Mary.

I illustrated this with an icon of Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child that I saw a week earlier in Corfu in the Church of Saint Eleftherios and Saint Anna.

In his book, Dedicated to Saint Anne (2008), Duncan Scarlett counted 29 churches and chapels within the Church of Ireland that are dedicated to Saint Anne, including Saint Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast, Saint Anne’s Church on Dawson Street, Dublin, and Saint Anne’s Church, Killanne, Co Wexford.

A shrine of Saint Anne in the former Jewish quarter of Porto (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

In Porto earlier this year, I heard how Saint Anne was one of two saints, alongside Saint Esther, who was popular among the conversos or anusim, the crypto-Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity in Portugal and Spain during the Inquisition.

Saint Anne was a popular figure among the conversos because, it was said, she had died before the birth of Christ so had never converted to Christianity yet was revered as a saint. When conversos were forced to place a shrine outside their homes as a sign of their commitment to Christianity, Saint Anne was often the saint of choice.

Of course, as Duncan Scarlett pointed out, Saint Anne and Saint Joachim are totally fictitious saints, constructed by the early Church to fill a perceived gap in the Biblical narrative of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Their names come only from New Testament apocrypha, and writings such as the Gospel of James, written sometime between 150 and 200. The story bears a similarity to that of the birth of Samuel, whose mother Hannah – etymologically the same name as Anne – had also been childless.

The Scroll of Esther in a synagogue in Prague (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Saint Esterica, who became popular in converso families from Portugal and Spain, was modelled on Queen Esther of Persia. She hid her Judaism when she married King Ahasuerus, and is said to have been a vegetarian to avoid eating non-kosher meat. She seemed to be fully assimilated, yet she never forgot who she really was.

When Ferdinand and Isabella established the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, many Jews converted to Catholicism outwardly. Inwardly, they kept practicing Judaism in secret, becoming anusim, conversos, or crypto-Jews.

Queen Esther was an inspiration for the anusim because she remembered her true but hidden Jewish identity while integrating into wider society.

Although Queen Esther was never canonised, the anusim transformed her into Saint Esther or Santa Esterica, and they continued to celebrated Purim by reinventing it as ‘the Festival of Saint Esther.’

When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, many Jews and conversos escaped to Portugal, taking their traditions with them. But a similar expulsion order was issued in Portugal in 1497. Many Spanish and Portuguese anusim then brought the traditions of Saint Esther to Mexico and other parts of the New World.

The Festival of Saint Esther included the three-day Fast of Queen Esther and the Feast of Saint Esther, when women fasted and then lit devotional candles in honour of Saint Esther, and when mothers and daughters cooked a banquet together, passing on family recipes that transmitted the traditions of kashrut or kosher food.

In crypto-Jewish homes, Queen Esther was represented in icons, statues and devotional paintings of Saint Esther, depicted wearing a crown adorned with myrtle and holding a sceptre decorated with a pomegranate, a tradition that continues to this day among some families in New Mexico.

Saint Anne’s feastday is celebrated in many parts of the Church on 26 July.

Saint Anne’s Church on Dawson Street, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Two questions I am asked after every holiday in Greece

Do beach holidays in Greece help the Greek economy … the beach below Malibu Taverna at Agios Georgios in south-west Corfu (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

When I return from Greece, I am inevitably asked questions that have become very familiar.

Like every returning holidaymaker, there are common questions such as did you have a good time, was the weather better than it was here, or was the food/wine/hotel good.

At one time, returning from Greece, people inevitably asked did I go island hopping.

But in recent years there are two questions I am always asked when I come back from Greece:

Are they still suffering from the impact of the economic crisis?

Did you see many refugees on the islands?

The two islands that I have visited recently – Crete three times in the past 18 months, and Corfu for a fortnight more recently – are cushioned, to a degree, from both of these crises.

Very few refugees make it as far as Corfu, although it has some large and visible Roma settlements that are in a very sad state. Crete too has very few refugees, although there have been some unusual and encouraging stories in recent years, including one of the integration of a Greek-speaking Syrian family in Crete, whose grandparents were Greek-speaking Muslims who had been forced to leave Greece in the 1920s.

Most refugees seem to arrive first in the Dodecanese islands and the islands close to the Turkish coast, including Chios and Lesbos. But I have seen refugees on the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki, and the memories of one encounter with a beautiful but impoverished refugee on the streets of Athens two years are still heart-breaking.

Tourism has not always cushioned businesses in Corfu against economic impacts (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

When it comes to the impacts of the economic crisis, at first these are less visible on islands such as Crete and Corfu.

These are large islands that benefit from tourism. Over the years, the tourist season has been extended, so that now it last for six months from April to October and is no longer concentrated on school holiday months.

Some reports say that about 25 per cent of the Greek economy is dependent on tourism. But it is inevitable that a hard Brexit is going to have an immediate impact on tourism, when prospective British tourists find the pound has lost its spending power and 2020 holidays have become more expensive.

Indeed, if economies throughout northern Europe take a harder hit than expected from a hard Brexit, the impact on the Greek tourist sector could be worse than forecasts are estimating.

But even in the places that benefit from tourism, it does not take too much searching to find poverty, if you walk around with your eyes open.

Nor is it difficult to see how the economic crisis has had an impact even in areas that have been cushioned most because of tourism.

Once lively bars, shops, hotels, restaurants and nightclubs have closed on every island. In some cases, of course, it is simply that fashions have changed, or trends demand new styles.

But in may cases families and businesses found themselves too stretched, unable to pay rising interest rates or ever-increasing taxes, or had expanded when they over-estimated potential growth in the tourist sector.

And so, when of the other questions I am asked is, how can I help?

Obviously, going to Greece on holidays is one immediate answer.

By and large I agree with the campaign that asks people not to holiday in the large, all-in-one resorts. Of course, they provide employment on a large scale. But their profits are usually sent out of Greece to large multinationals, and they take business away from local restaurants, bars, shops and family-run hotels.

Tourism is a form of taxation. It transfers large sums of money from northern Europe to Greece, sustains local economies, creates and keeps jobs, and the tax revenues it generates help the recovery of the Greek economy.

Buy in local shops, eat in local restaurants, drink in local bars, visit the churches, monasteries and museums.

There are ways too of helping Greece to deal with the refugee problem. It is in inequitable that large number of refugees making their way through Turkey to Europe are caught in a ‘limbo’ in Greece, and the Greek economy cannot afford to handle this crisis alone.

Continuing political pressure is the obvious way to change attitudes. There are Irish volunteers like Caoimhe Butterly and Valerie Cox who gave gone to the islands in recent years to work with the refugees, and there are churches and agencies that could use your support, contribution and prayers.

But going to Greece is the best way to help Greece. You will see for yourself, and it will change your approaches to Greece’s problems and how you respond to them in your political, social and cultural attitudes … and, if you pray, how you pray too.

It is sad to see family businesses close in island resorts (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)