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Here is a tribute to St. Joan of Arc from The New York Times in honor of her six hundredth birthday on January 6. (Via
Nobility.)
What is it about Joan of Arc? Why is her story of enduring interest more than a half a millennium after her birth?
By the time Joan of Arc was 16 and had proclaimed herself the virgin
warrior sent by God to deliver France from her enemies, the English, she
had been receiving the counsel of angels for three years. Until then,
the voices she said she heard, speaking from over her right shoulder and
accompanied by a great light, had been hers alone, a rapturous secret.
But in 1428, when the voices pressed her to undertake the quest for
which they had been preparing her, they transformed a seemingly
undistinguished peasant into a visionary heroine who defied every
limitation placed on a woman of the late Middle Ages. The least likely
of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred
Years’ War and of history.
Joan said she sheared off her hair, dressed in male attire, put on armor
and took up her sword at God’s behest. She was feverish in her
determination to succeed at what was, by anyone’s measure, a
preposterous mission. As Joan herself protested to her voices, she “knew
not how to ride or lead in war”; and yet she roused an exhausted,
underequipped and impotent army into a fervor that carried it from one
unlikely victory to the next. She raised the siege of Orléans by defying
the cautious strategies of seasoned generals to follow inaudible
directions from invisible beings.
Illiterate and uncouth, Joan moved purposefully among nobles, bishops
and royalty. So intent on vanquishing the enemy that she threatened her
own men with violence, she herself recoiled at the idea of bloodshed. To
avoid having to use her sword, she led her army carrying a 12-foot-long
banner emblazoned with the words Party of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Witnesses said she was luminous in battle, light not glinting off her
armor so much as radiating from the girl within. Her enemies spoke of
clouds of butterflies following in her wake, a curiously beatific report
from men who said she was in league with the devil.
In the aftermath of combat she didn’t celebrate victory but mourned the
casualties; her men remembered her on her knees weeping as she held the
head of a dying enemy soldier, urging him to confess his sins. Her
courage outstripped that of seasoned men at arms; her tears flowed as
readily as any other teenage girl’s.
After a series of victories, Joan suffered the reversals her voices had
predicted. Captured and sold to the English, and shackled in a dank cell
for more than a year, Joan was put on trial for her life. For refusing
to renounce the voices that guided her as deviltry, Joan, 19 years old,
was burned at the stake before a jeering crowd, her charred body
displayed to anyone who cared to examine it. Thirty years later, in
1450, a Rehabilitation Trial overturned the guilty verdict that
condemned her to death; the 19th-century rediscovery of the transcripts
from both trials resulted in her canonization in 1920.
Like all holy figures whose earthly existence separates them from the
broad mass of humanity, a saint is a story, and Joan of Arc’s is like no
other. (Read entire article.)
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3 comments:
Thank you for sharing that. Saint Joan of Arc is definitely a beloved saint in our family.
When I was 10, I dressed up as Saint Joan of Arc for a Halloween party at our public school. Everyone kept thinking I was trying to be Robin Hood (my costume was lacking), so I ended up telling a dozen or so people about her. It was a funny little opportunity to share the faith.
Years and years later, my daughter dressed up like Saint Joan of Arc. Fortunately, her friends knew who she was! :)
Peace and blessings!
Beloved to this day....Everyone loves hearing stories about hidden people who come from nowhere, discover their destiny, and alter history.
Thank you for the wonderful stories, Veronica, and thank you for visiting. Yes, julygirl, Joan's memory is immortal.
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