Feast day: May 30
Patron of soldiers and France
b.1412 d.1431
St.
Joan of Arc
St. Joan of Arc is the patroness of soldiers and
of France. On January 6, 1412, Joan of Arc was born to pious
parents of the French peasant class, at the obscure village of
Domremy, near the province of Lorraine. At a very early age, she
heard voices: those of St. Michael, St. Catherine and St.
Margaret.
At first the messages were personal and general.
Then at last came the crowning order. In May, 1428, her voices
"of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret" told
Joan to go to the King of France and help him reconquer his
kingdom. For at that time the English king was after the throne of
France, and the Duke of Burgundy, the chief rival of the French
king, was siding with him and gobbling up evermore French
territory.
After overcoming opposition from churchmen and
courtiers, the seventeen year old girl was given a small army with
which she raised the seige of Orleans on May 8, 1429. She then
enjoyed a series of spectacular military successes, during which
the King was able to enter Rheims and be crowned with her at his
side.
In May 1430, as she was attempting to relieve
Compiegne, she was captured by the Burgundians and sold to the
English when Charles and the French did nothing to save her. After
months of imprisonment, she was tried at Rouen by a tribunal
presided over by the infamous Peter Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais,
who hoped that the English would help him to become archbishop.
Through her unfamiliarity with the technicalities
of theology, Joan was trapped into making a few damaging
statements. When she refused to retract the assertion that it was
the saints of God who had commanded her to do what she had done,
she was condemned to death as a heretic, sorceress, and
adulteress, and burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. She was
nineteen years old. Some thirty years later, she was exonerated of
all guilt and she was ultimately canonized in 1920, making
official what the people had known for centuries. Her feast day is
May 30.
Joan was canonized in 1920 by Pope Benedict XV.