A Miracle at St.Anne

In this image from the 1950s, Knights of Columbus lead the procession of pilgrims past St. Anne Church on the Feast Day of St. Anne. (Kankakee County Museum Photo Archive)

By Jack KlaseyMarch 29, 2025

On Monday afternoon, July 26, 1909, the Catholic Church of St. Anne was packed with worshippers celebrating the annual feast day of the saint for whom both the church and the village were named.

The St. Anne Feast Day celebration had drawn several thousand visitors to the small Kankakee County town to participate in a 10 a.m. solemn High Mass, a formal procession, and other religious activities. The largest group of pilgrims, some 1,100 people from Kankakee, Bradley, and Bourbonnais, arrived at 7 a.m. aboard a special train from Kankakee. An hour later, a train with 400 passengers from Chicago pulled into the St. Anne depot. That group was led by the Rev. Achille Bergeron, pastor of Notre Dame Church on Chicago’s West Side, who had been bringing large groups of pilgrims to St. Anne since 1886.

At 1:30 p.m., Father Bergeron, a native of Bourbonnais, led a stately procession of pilgrims on its route around the block-square church grounds. He held high the ornate gold and glass container (called a reliquary) enclosing the relic of St. Anne, who is revered by Catholics as the grandmother of Jesus. The relic is a small piece of bone from the saint’s wrist.

Since the feast day observance began in the early 1880s, there had been a number of reported cures of physical problems, such as blindness or paralysis. The Chicago Tribune, on July 27, 1900, recorded the miraculous cure of a 20-year-old Chicago woman, Miss Matilda Cunnea: “She had come to St. Anne…unable to walk and a victim of paralysis for two years, and on St. Anne’s day, after having venerated the relic, she arose from the invalid chair in which she had been brought to the church, and walked from the church completely restored.” To this day, Miss Cunnea’s wheelchair is a prominent item displayed in St. Anne Church.

Each year, the pilgrimage crowd at St. Anne includes a number of people seeking a cure. Among those attending in the year 1909 were Mr. and Mrs. Edouard Fontaine, who lived on Station Street in Kankakee. Accompanying them, and the focus of their hopes and prayers for a miracle, was their three-year-old daughter, Lillian.

The Kankakee Daily Republican, in its July 27, 1909, edition, displayed the headline, “Sight Given Blind Child at St. Anne.” The newspaper informed its readers, “The miraculous cure reported at 3:40 p.m.…was that of Lillian…the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Edouard Fontaine…who recovered her sight a few moments after the veneration of the relic. According to the child’s mother…two years ago she recovered partially her sight, but the recovery was only of a few days’ duration. She became blind when [she was] seven months old.

“As the priest touched the relic to the child’s closed eyelids, the little one trembled, then opening her eyes, and with a startled look around her, shrieked convulsively and buried her head on her mother’s shoulder. The mother, alarmed, lifted the child’s face, and as the little one again beheld the light and the sea of faces in the church, she clung frantically to her mother and sobbed piteously. The mother, realizing she was cured, wept with the child, until Father Bergeron…assisted the mother and child from the church….Her right eye is red and was not fully opened, but, as both father and mother have faith in St. Anne, they believe she will be able to see perfectly well.

“When it became known that the cure was effected, the little one became the magnet of attraction for the pilgrims, especially the afflicted ones, who renewed their faith in St. Anne’s power, though they were not the mediums through which it was expressed, and congratulated the mother on the restoration of her little daughter’s sight. Mother and child were fearfully happy as they boarded the train out of St. Anne.”

The newspaper also reported two less dramatic cures that took place later in the afternoon: “Mrs. Honore E. George of Essex was cured of an ailment of which she was partially relieved last year, and Martha Colinski of Kankakee was made strong and well after being a cripple for years.”

Although the number of pilgrims coming to St. Anne on July 26 now numbers in the hundreds rather than thousands, church and community traditions remain strong; the annual celebration will be held for the 144th time in 2025.

Jack Klasey is a former Journal reporter and a retired publishing executive. He can be contacted at jwklasey@comcast.net.