Sainte Anne Church

Sainte Anne Church, commonly called 'Ste. Anne Church' or 'Ste. Anne's Church', is a Roman Catholic church that serves the parish of Sainte Anne de Michilimackinac in Mackinac Island, Michigan. The Jesuit missionary Claude Dablon inaugurated the rites of the Catholic faith on Mackinac Island in 1670, but the earliest surviving parish records list sacraments performed starting in April 1695. After moving from Fort de Buade to Fort Michilimackinac about 1708 and from Fort Michilimackinac to Mackinac Island in 1781, the parish used a historic log church for decades. It constructed the current church complex starting in 1874 on a site donated by the former fur trader, Magdelaine Laframboise.

The parish began as a mission church of the Society of Jesus, served by Jesuits at Fort de Buade at the site of the current St. Ignace, and then by members of the same Order at Fort Michilimackinac (located within present-day Mackinaw City. The parish's Jesuit heritage became diluted in the 1740s when a primary focus of the mission outreach, the Odawa (Ottawa) peoples of the Straits of Mackinac, moved in search of fertile farmland from the sandy region around Fort Michilimackinac to new L'Arbre Croche locations southwestward along the Lake Michigan coast. Cross Village developed at their central village. The Fort Michilimackinac location evolved into service as a parish church for a partly transient population that included many traveling fur traders and voyageurs. The fort's church and parish were increasingly identified with Saint Anne, whom many voyageurs revered as a patron saint.

The remaining ties between the Society of Jesus and the parish of Sainte Anne de Michilimackinac were broken in 1765 when the news of the Suppression of the Society of Jesus was brought to the interior of North America. The Jesuit Order could no longer staff this or other Great Lakes mission churches. The parish was maintained through the devoted efforts of a succession of lay parishioners, many of them women. This status, which under other circumstances might have been seen as slightly irregular by the standards of that day, was accepted and celebrated by the Church because of the devotion of the parishioners. For example, the lay leadership carefully maintained a dwelling space, attached to the church, for the absent priest. It was during this period of de facto lay leadership, during which time the parish did not have an assigned priest, that the church building was disassembled and moved (under British orders) from Fort Michilimackinac to Mackinac Island, its new permanent home, in 1780-1781.

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