Joan of Arc
1412–1431
Feast: May 30 (proper calendar of France)
You don't wait to be asked. When you know what is right, you move, even while everyone else stays seated. Joan was exactly that: a peasant girl of seventeen who stands before the crown prince of France and tells him God has sent her. They laugh at her. Then they hand her a suit of armor. She lifts the siege of Orléans, leads the king to his coronation at Reims, and in the end pays with her life, nineteen years old, betrayed and burned, a cross held before her eyes. Five hundred years later the Church declares her a saint. Her strength was not fearlessness. It was obedience to God before all fear of men. So here is the question: What would you stand up for?
From her life
- Voices at Domrémy
- Orléans
- Coronation at Reims
- Captivity, a political trial, death by fire at nineteen
- Rehabilitated in 1456, canonized in 1920
„Wenn ich nicht in der Gnade Gottes bin, so möge Gott mich hineinversetzen; und wenn ich darin bin, so möge er mich darin bewahren.“
Source: Prozessakten, 3. Verhör am 24. Februar 1431 (Quicherat, Procès Bd. I, S. 65)
The bridge to tradition
Obedience to God before all fear of men, and a love for the Mass that is documented in the records of her trial.