St. Joan of Arc
The Maid of Orléans
A seventeen-year-old farm girl who heard the voices of saints, led armies, crowned a king — and answered her judges so well that her trial became her glory.
- Feast
- May 30
- Lived
- c. 1412–1431
Invoked For
- France
- Soldiers
- Prisoners
- Those mocked for their faith
His Life
Jeanne was born about 1412 in Domrémy, a village on the edge of a France that was losing the Hundred Years' War: the English and their allies held Paris and the whole north, and the true heir, Charles, was an uncrowned king with a collapsing cause. She never learned to read or write. At about thirteen, in her father's garden, she began to hear what she called her Voices — St. Michael the Archangel, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret — telling her, over four years and with increasing urgency, to go to the aid of the king of France.
In 1429, aged seventeen, this farm girl talked her way to an armed escort, rode across enemy country dressed as a soldier, and identified the disguised Charles at once in a crowded hall. Examined for three weeks by theologians at Poitiers, she was pronounced sound; asked for a sign, she gave the answer that still rings: "In God's name, the soldiers will fight, and God will give the victory."
He did. Placed at the head of the army with her white banner, Joan relieved the besieged city of Orléans in nine days — a reversal so sudden that both sides read it as the judgment of heaven. Within months she had won the Loire campaign and stood beside Charles VII at his coronation at Reims, her mission fulfilled. She was eighteen.
Captured the next year and sold to the English, she was tried for heresy at Rouen by a court whose verdict was written in advance. For months, alone, chained, without counsel, the illiterate girl parried the finest legal minds of the age — asked if she was in a state of grace, she answered, "If I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may God keep me there." She was burned in the marketplace of Rouen on May 30, 1431, aged about nineteen, holding a cross a sympathetic English soldier tied together from a stick, and calling on the name of Jesus. Her executioner wept that night that he had burned a saint.
The Path to Sainthood
Twenty-five years later, a papal court reopened the case at the petition of her mother. In 1456 the verdict of Rouen was annulled as fraudulent — Joan was formally innocent, and the trial record that had been meant to destroy her became the chief evidence of her sanctity, preserving her own words in her own voice.
She was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920 by Pope Benedict XV — not as a martyr for the faith, technically, but as a virgin who had lived heroic virtue; though the whole world understands her death as a martyrdom of obedience to conscience.
She is the patroness of France, and her feast is kept on the anniversary of the fire that could not unmake her. Of her Voices she said simply: "I do believe it as firmly as I believe that our Lord Jesus Christ suffered death to redeem us from the pains of hell."
Prayers to St. Joan of Arc
Tap any prayer to open it large and clear — set for reading aloud. Close it to return here and choose another.