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Home  / News & Publications /  Michigan Catholic News / 2010 / Ste. Anne marks novena's 100 years, early parishioners' tombstone blessing

by Robert Delaney of The Michigan Catholic
Published July 2, 2010

Robert Delaney | The Michigan Catholic Basilian Fr. Thomas Sepulveda, pastor of Ste. Anne de Detroit Parish, with a Ste. Anne statue that was formerly in St. John Cantius Church in Detroit's Delray district.

DETROIT – Historic Ste. Anne de Detroit Parish will both achieve a milestone and receive a headstone this month.

The milestone is 100 years of weekly novena prayers to St. Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin. (The parish spells it Ste. Anne, because Ste. is the abbreviation of the feminine French "sainte.")

And the headstone – actually a substantial granite monument, to be dedicated Saturday, July 24, by Cardinal Edmund C. Szoka – will mark the mass grave in Mount Elliott Cemetery where early parishioners' remains were reburied in 1869.

The parish, the oldest in the Archdiocese of Detroit, dates its founding to July 26, 1701, two days after the founding of Fort Pontchartrain – which would eventually become Detroit — by French colonial official Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.

The parish's celebration of a full century of saying the novena prayer to St. Anne following each 5:15 p.m. Tuesday Mass will be a part of its annual novena to St. Anne, beginning on Saturday, July 17, and concluding Sunday, July 25, followed by the Mass for the feast day of Sts. Anne and Joachim on Monday, July 26.

"We know the weekly use of the novena prayer began in 1910. The full novena (a novena is nine consecutive days of prayer) is much older, though we can't place any exact date when it began here," said Fr. Thomas Sepulveda, CSB, Ste. Anne's pastor for the past seven years.

As it does every year, each night of the novena will have a special theme – seven nights will be ethnic celebrations:

• African American on July 17
• Irish on July 19
• Polish on July 20
• Latino on July 22
• Ukrainian and Croatian on July 23
• French on July 24
• Italian on July 25, with a festival following the Mass and novena prayers.

July 18 will be dedicated to Ste. Anne alumni, and July 21 will be a special healing Mass with the sacrament of anointing. Mass times during the novena are 7 p.m. each night, except for Sundays, which will be at noon.

Different this year will be the participation of the three Basilian bishops – Bishop Ronald Fabbro of London, Ontario; Archbishop J. Michael Miller of Vancouver, British Columbia; and Las Cruces, N.M. – each of whom will preach, preside at Mass and lead the novena prayers and post-Mass procession.

Fr. Sepulveda said many people in the Detroit area have a devotion to St. Anne, "I think, because she's pretty close to Our Lord, because of the power of her intercession, and because she was the original patroness of Detroit and patroness of French Canada."

In the early years of Ste. Anne Parish, its dead were buried either in the church or just outside the stockade, about Jefferson Avenue and Griswold Street. As the church moved (the one that burned in the Great Fire of 1805 was the sixth building) and the city grew, some remains were moved several times.

They were all relocated to their final resting place in a mass grave in Mount Elliott Cemetery in 1869.

But when members of the French Canadian Historical Society of Michigan saw the unmarked burial site while on a 2007 tour of the cemetery, they began an effort to have some kind of monument erected. That effort will culminate July 24, when Cardinal Szoka blesses the monument they had commissioned.

The 2 p.m. ceremony will include hymns, a roll call of those buried from Ste. Anne Parish during those years, and remarks by members of the society. A reception will follow at the Solanus Casey Center, across Mount Elliott Avenue from the cemetery.

"It brings a religious closure, knowing where your ancestors are buried and having the marker blessed by the cardinal," said Rosemary Kirt, a member of St. Andrew Parish in Rochester.

Suzanne Sommerville, a member of St. Margaret of Scotland Parish in St. Clair Shores, said she is a descendant or relative of a number of those who accompanied Cadillac on that original 1701 convoy of canoes to what was to become Detroit.

"All of my ancestors came to New France between 1630 and 1750, and Francois Fafard dit Delorme, a cousin, was Cadillac's first interpreter for the Ottawa language," she continued. Delorme and his wife, Madeleine Jobin, were among the first French to actually settle in the new community.

Ste. Anne de Detroit Church is at 1000 Ste. Anne St., Detroit. Telephone: (313) 496-1701.