Feast day: May 30

St. Joan of Arc

Virgin, Martyr of Conscience · 1412–1431

Patron of France, soldiers, prisoners

Illiterate teenage peasant who, guided by voices of saints, led French armies to victory — then was burned at the stake at 19 after a rigged trial.

Joan was born about 1412 to a peasant family at Domrémy in eastern France, during the long agony of the Hundred Years' War, when much of the kingdom lay under English control and the rightful heir went uncrowned. From about thirteen she began to hear what she described as the voices of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, telling her she was chosen to drive out the invaders and have the dauphin crowned king.

Astonishingly, this illiterate teenage girl persuaded first a local captain and then the dauphin Charles himself to trust her. Clad in armor and carrying a banner, she rode with the French army to the besieged city of Orléans and, by her courage and conviction, inspired the troops to lift the siege in 1429 — a stunning reversal that turned the war. Soon after, she stood beside Charles as he was crowned king at Reims, just as she had foretold.

Captured the next year and sold to the English, she was put on trial for heresy and witchcraft before a Church court packed with her enemies. Alone, without counsel, the unschooled girl answered her learned judges with such simplicity, shrewdness, and faith that the records of her trial remain among the most moving documents of the age. Condemned, she was burned at the stake at Rouen in 1431, dying at about nineteen with the name of Jesus on her lips.

A quarter-century later a Church investigation overturned the verdict as unjust and fraudulent. The cause of the 'Maid of Orléans' was at last carried forward in the modern age: she was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920. A patron of France and of soldiers, she remains one of history's most remarkable figures — a peasant girl who, on the strength of her voices, changed the fate of a nation.

The Church court that condemned her was overturned 25 years later; the English soldier who watched her burn reportedly cried, 'We have burned a saint.'

“I am not afraid. I was born to do this.”
— St. Joan of Arc

Image: artist unknown (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/08409c.htm