France
Named a secondary patron of France, with the Blessed Virgin as principal patron and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux beside her.
VIRGIN · SOLDIER · SAINT
Saint Joan of Arc
Jeanne d’Arc, La Pucelle d’Orléans
A peasant girl of Lorraine who heard God, raised the siege of Orléans, saw a king crowned, and went to the fire rather than deny the voices that had led her.
THE MAID
A short remembering
Joan of Arc was born about 1412 in Domrémy, a village on the Meuse, while France was tearing itself apart in the Hundred Years’ War. At thirteen she began to hear Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret. They sent her to the Dauphin, to Orléans, and to Reims.
In a single season of 1429 she changed the war. The English were driven from Orléans. Charles VII was anointed in the cathedral of Clovis. A year later she was captured, sold, and tried in Rouen by a court that needed her to be a heretic. She was about nineteen when she died, on 30 May 1431.
Twenty-five years later the Church reversed the sentence. In 1920 Pope Benedict XV raised her to the altars. This house keeps both her history and her devotion — the facts of the trial, and the prayers of those who still ask the Maid to stand with them.
INGRES, 1854
At the coronation
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted her as the Church came to remember her: armored, haloed, the standard raised in Reims Cathedral, the altar at her hand. The Maid who could not write stands in the place where France received its king.
The road to ReimsPATRONAGE
Who asks her help
Soldiers
Invoked by those who serve under arms, and by women in the military who look to the Maid who carried a banner rather than a sword.
Prisoners
A patron of captives, remembering the months she spent in irons at Rouen and her insistence that a prisoner may lawfully try to escape.
The ridiculed
Patron of people mocked for their faith — a peasant girl who was laughed at in the courts of men and still obeyed God.
FEAST DAY
—
May 30
“If I am not in the state of grace, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.”
SISTER SHRINE
The Combined Hearts
Joan the warrior and Thérèse the little flower — sword and rose, one flame. Thérèse called her sister, and asked her to save France a second time.
Visit the Combined HeartsCOMPANION NARRATIVE
Joan of Arc: To Reims
From the voices at Domrémy to the anointing at Reims — the Maid’s road told in order, as the chronicles give it.
Read To Reims