Saint Joan of Arc

It was a treacherous question. If she answered “yes”, they would condemn her for pride, since according to the Church’s teaching no one can be certain of being in God’s grace. If she answered “no”, she would be admitting she was a sinner, and everything she had said about “voices from heaven” would be false.

The trial record notes that her questioners were stunned. That girl was Joan, whom later generations call Jeanne d’Arc, and whom Vietnamese Catholics know as Thánh Gioanna Đắc — Saint Joan of Arc.

There are few saints whose very words we know so well. We owe this not to those who loved her, but to those who wanted to kill her: the record of the trial that condemned her, carefully noting every question and every answer, still survives today.

Few people know that she never called herself “Jeanne d’Arc”. Before the court she said that in her village she was called Jeannette, and after she left home people called her Jeanne. She did not know what her surname was. The name she called herself, and used to sign her letters, was “Jehanne la Pucelle”, Joan the Maid. “d’Arc” was her father’s surname, used later by historians, and it became the name the whole world knows.

At that time France was in the Hundred Years’ War with England. The English and their Burgundian allies held almost half of France, including Paris. The heir to the throne, the Dauphin Charles, had not yet been crowned, and was holed up south of the Loire, mocked by his enemies as “the king of Bourges”. The village of Domrémy lay right in the borderlands, and its people had had to flee when soldiers passed through, burning and looting.

Later she also heard the voices of Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, two virgin martyrs. Those voices came to her often, especially when the church bells rang. And little by little they told her something unbelievable: she must go and save France, lift the siege of Orléans, and take the Dauphin to Reims to be crowned.

She was a country girl who had never ridden a warhorse or held a sword, and she could not read. She kept the secret for three years, telling no one, not even the parish priest. Her father, knowing nothing of the voices but having once dreamed that his daughter ran off with soldiers, told his sons that if that ever really happened, they should drown their sister in the river before letting that happen.

At sixteen she went to Vaucouleurs, the nearest town with the Dauphin’s troops, and asked to see the commander. He laughed in her face and told her uncle to take her home to her father for a few good slaps. She did not give up. She went back a second time, then a third. In the end, as the townspeople began to believe in her, the commander agreed to give her a horse, a sword and six men as an escort.

Witnesses later said that the court wanted to test her: the Dauphin mingled among his courtiers, dressed like everyone else, to see whether the girl would recognize the heir to the throne. She went straight up to him and knelt to greet him. Then she asked to see him privately, and told him something no one else has ever learned. All we know is that after that meeting, the Dauphin began to believe in her.

But the court remained cautious. They sent her to the city of Poitiers to be examined by theologians for three weeks: was she sent by God, or a witch, or just a mad girl? One theologian asked, in a heavy local accent: “What language do your voices speak?” She answered: “A better one than yours.” They asked whether she believed in God. She said: “More than you do.” They demanded a sign. She replied: “I did not come to Poitiers to make signs. Take me to Orléans, and I will show you the sign I was sent to give.”

Joan was given a suit of white armor. But she did not carry a sword into battle. She carried a white banner showing Christ enthroned over the world, with an angel on either side, and the words “Jhesus Maria”. Later, before the court, she said she loved her banner forty times more than her sword, and carried the banner into battle so as not to have to kill anyone. She said she had never killed anyone.

Before attacking, she dictated a letter to the English commanders, urging them to go home in peace. She made the soldiers go to confession, forbade them to swear, and sent away the women who followed the army. Hardened soldiers, used to looting, for the first time found themselves going into battle behind a seventeen-year-old girl carrying a banner who made them go to Mass.

On May 7, 1429, in the attack on the fortress of the Tourelles guarding the way into the city, an arrow pierced her between the neck and shoulder. She wept with pain, but pulled the arrow out herself, then went back to the fight as evening came on. Seeing her banner flying again, the French surged forward. The fortress fell. The next morning, May 8, the English withdrew. The siege of Orléans, which had lasted more than seven months, was lifted within nine days of her arrival.

To this day, nearly six hundred years later, the city of Orléans holds a festival on May 8 every year, a tradition that began the very year after the battle. Each year a young woman of the city is chosen to wear armor, ride a horse and play Joan at the head of the procession.

On July 17, 1429, in Reims Cathedral, the Dauphin Charles was anointed and became King Charles VII. Joan stood beside the altar, holding her banner. Later, before the court, she was asked why her banner had been carried into the cathedral at the coronation, when the other commanders’ banners had not. She answered with words the French still know by heart: “It had shared in the toil; it was right that it should share in the honor.”

Her father and mother had come from Domrémy to Reims for the ceremony. It was the last time they saw their daughter.

On May 23, 1430, in a skirmish outside the town of Compiègne, Joan stayed at the rear to cover the troops retreating into the town. The town gate was shut before she could get in. A Burgundian archer pulled her from her horse by her cloak. She was captured.

She was held in the tower of Beaurevoir. Hearing that the enemy was about to massacre the people of Compiègne, she said she would “rather die than live to see good people killed”, and jumped from the tower, more than a dozen meters up. She did not die, but was badly hurt and unconscious for several days. Later she admitted before the court that the voices had told her not to jump, and that she had asked God’s forgiveness.

King Charles VII, whom she had brought to the throne, did nothing to ransom her. The Burgundians sold her to the English for ten thousand livres.

The trial began in January 1431 in Rouen, presided over by Bishop Pierre Cauchon, a man who sided with the English. For months the nineteen-year-old was held in a cell guarded day and night by English soldiers, her legs in chains, instead of in a Church prison guarded by nuns as the law required. She was interrogated dozens of times, sometimes by several people firing questions at once.

It was during that trial that the girl who could not read said things that left professors of the University of Paris at a loss. When they asked whether Saint Michael wore clothes when he appeared to her, she asked back: “Do you think God has nothing to clothe him with?” When they asked whether God hated the English, she said: “I do not know whether God loves or hates the English. I only know they will be driven out of France, except those who die here.”

They accused her of wearing men’s clothing, against the law. She explained that among guards watching her day and night, men’s clothing, with its tightly fastened laces, was the only way to protect her chastity.

On May 24, before a stake already prepared, frightened and exhausted, she signed a recantation with a cross and promised to wear women’s clothing again. But only a few days later, she was wearing men’s clothing again. Some witnesses later said the guards had taken away her women’s clothing, or that she had been threatened with assault. She told the judges that the voices had reproached her for denying the truth to save her life. And so she was condemned as a “relapsed heretic” and handed over to the secular court to be burned alive.

Those present later testified that amid the flames she called out the name “Jesus” many times, the last time very loudly. Many in the crowd, including some of the English, burst into tears. Some say a secretary of the English king walked away saying: “We are lost; we have burned a saint.”

More than a hundred witnesses were questioned: villagers of Domrémy, soldiers who had followed her, clergy who had been present in Rouen. On July 7, 1456, the court declared the sentence of 1431 null and void, full of deceit and injustice. Joan was rehabilitated.

But it would be nearly five hundred years more before she was raised to the altars. In 1909 Pope Pius X beatified her. On May 16, 1920, just after the First World War, Pope Benedict XV canonized her. Two years later she was declared second patron of France.

The American writer Mark Twain, famous for his stories about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, spent twelve years researching and two years writing a novel about Joan. Near the end of his life he said it was the best of all his books, and the one he loved most.

Over the centuries, Joan has become one of the figures most written about, painted and put on the stage in European history. Shakespeare, Schiller, Voltaire and Bernard Shaw all wrote about her, each in his own way, some mocking, some praising. Every age and every faction has wanted to claim her as its own symbol.

In 2011, at a general audience, Pope Benedict XVI devoted a whole catechesis to Saint Joan. He stressed something biographers often forget: the center of that young woman’s life was not battle, but prayer. She had a very personal love for Jesus, always putting the names of Jesus and Mary on her banner and in her letters, and it was that love that made her strong. He also spoke of a painful paradox: she was a saint condemned by a Church tribunal, and it was the Church itself that later recognized that error and raised her to the altars.

People often remember Joan as a heroine leading troops, riding a horse, wearing armor. But perhaps what made her a saint lies not in her victories, but in what she did when every victory was lost. Abandoned by the very king she served, unjustly condemned by men holding office in the Church, she still did not hate the Church. She still asked to go to confession, asked to receive the Body of the Lord, asked for a cross, and called the name of Jesus until her last breath.

She never said she was sure of being saved. She only said: if I am not in God’s grace, may God put me there; if I am, may God keep me there. That is the prayer of a humble person, not of a heroine. And perhaps it is the most beautiful prayer a young person can carry with them every day.