(C.D. Stampley Enterprises, Charlotte, NC 2001). Used with permission.

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When Hurt By the Church

St. Joan of Arc (1412-1431)

Feast day: May 30

The calendar of the saints is filled with stories of faithful Catholic men and women who suffered injustice from worldly Church officials. No case is more famous than that of St. Joan of Arc, the victim of a conniving tribunal of bishops and priests that falsely condemned her as a heretic and a sorceress then turned her over to the civil power to be burned at the stake.

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The France into which Joan was born in 1412 desperately needed saving. On and off since 1337 the country had been at war with England whose kings were determined to seize the French crown by force of arms. By the time Joan was born this Hundred Years’ War was winding down—and it appeared that England would be the victor. Most of the country was in English hands including the city of Paris. The rich and militarily mighty Duke of Burgundy had allied himself with the English. The French king Charles VI was dead and his spineless son the Dauphin Charles had not yet been crowned. Moreover it appeared unlikely that this prince would ever become king. Hard as it may be to believe the Dauphin’s own mother Queen Isabeau had hinted that Charles’ father might have been someone other than the late king. Worse, Queen Isabeau had gone so far as to sign a treaty that implied her son’s illegitimacy and barred him from inheriting the throne of France.

In this anxious, uncertain time Joan was born on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, in the village of Domremy in the Meuse valley. Her parents Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée already had three children—two boys and a girl. At the baptismal font in the church of Domremy she received the name Jeanne, the French form of Joan. She had ten godparents, which was the custom in Catholic Europe until the number was limited to two by the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century.

The d’Arcs were a family of peasant farmers, although a bit more prosperous than most of their neighbors. In recognition of Jacques d’Arc’s reputation for prudence and good character the local lord appointed him sergeant of Domremy, a position that fell immediately after the mayor and the sheriff giving Jacques authority to collect taxes from his fellow villagers.

Joan’s parents did not spoil her. Conscious of their standing in the village they worried that their children might do something to shame the family. Time and again Jacques told Joan that if she lost her virtue she deserved to be drowned, and if her brothers proved unwilling to toss her in the water he would drown her himself.

Joan never learned to read or write. Once she began her mission, however, someone taught her how to write her name—we have several documents that bear her signature.

One day when Joan was fourteen years old, as she stood in the family’s vegetable plot about noontime, she saw a bright light and heard the voice of St. Michael the Archangel. St. Michael told her that she had been chosen by God to save France. Then he said that soon she would be visited by St. Margaret of Antioch and St. Catherine of Alexandria. For the next two years Joan was visited by these three saints. At her trial she testified that they came in dazzling light, gave off a lovely perfume, and even permitted her to embrace them. When one of her Judges asked if the saints spoke to her in English, she gave the scornful reply, “Why should they speak to me in English when they are not on the English side?”

Theaterical and film versions of Joan’s life have distorted her personality. They depict her as mild and ladylike, attributing to her a degree of social polish she did not possess. The transcript of her interview with a panel of churchmen at Poitiers and the transcript of her trial at Rouen show us that Joan could be prickly, defensive, abrupt, even sarcastic. She routinely used mild oaths, most commonly “by the name of God” and “by Saint Mary.” What deference she possessed she reserved for her “gentle Dauphin.”

In 1428 the great archangel told Joan it was time for her mission to begin. He commanded her to go to Robert de Baudricourt, captain of the fortress of Vaucouleurs, who would help her reach the Dauphin. Joan was reluctant to leave home. It took three visits from St. Michael in one week before she agreed to do as she was told.

Joan needed some excuse to leave Domremy. One of her first cousins Jeanne Lassois and her husband Durand lived two miles from Vaucouleurs, so she asked her parents’ permission to go visit them. Once she was safely away from home Joan told her cousin-in-law her secret. He must have thought her naive at the least, but when they arrived in Vaucouleurs Joan identified de Baudricourt immediately although she had never seen the captain before. At her trial she told her Judges that St. Michael had pointed him out to her.

De Baudricourt humored the girl as she told of her mission from the King of Heaven to relieve Orleans, see the Dauphin crowned king, and drive the English from France. When she finished speaking. de Baudricourt laughed at her and told Durand to take the girl home and give her a good whipping. Joan’s first attempt to begin her mission ended in failure.

In January 1429 cousin Jeanne Lassois was about to give birth to a child. Under the pretext of helping her cousin Joan managed to get away from Domremy again. Once again she presented herself to Robert de Baudricourt requesting an escort of armed men to take her to Chinon, the residence of the Dauphin. This time, inexplicably, de Baudricourt gave in; he agreed to send her to the Dauphin.

Cousin Durand bought her a horse for the journey and a suit of black men’s clothes so she could pass through the countryside without attracting attention. She also cut her hair short. With her escort she out for Chinon, sending a letter ahead of her to the Dauphin saying that she was coming to save France.

The Dauphin Joan longed to see was not a storybook prince. He was painfully thin, knock-kneed, with an unattractive face and eyes that darted nervously from one thing to the next. Behind his back his courtiers called “the Clown.” Furthermore he was out of money. He had pawned the crown jewels yet still was so short of cash he had to make humiliating economies such as having his worn-out tunics made over with new sleeves.

Joan aroused Charles’ curiosity but he did not really welcome her visit. By temperament they were opposites. He was nervous and hesitant; she was resolute. He was not even sure if he was the Dauphin; she believed absolutely that she was the ambassador of the King of Heaven. Relatives, counselors, and flatterers pulled Charles in a dozen different directions; Joan’s one direct path admitted no distractions.

It was by no means a given that the Dauphin would agree to see Joan. Mystics, visionaries, and self-appointed saviors were thick on the ground in medieval Europe. Yet because that stalwart, down-to-earth soldier Robert de Baudricourt had sent Joan to Chinon with two of his own lieutenants as escort, Charles thought twice before dismissing the girl as another peasant with religious delusions.

Charles agreed to see Joan but he also laid a trap for her. He had one his vassals dress as the Dauphin while Charles, in less magnificent attire, stood among the crowd that filled the Great Hall of his chateau. Joan entered the hall, took one look at the impostor, and asked the assembly of 300 nobles, courtiers, and clergy why they tried to deceive her. Then she waded into the crowd until she stood before Charles. She curtsied (which must have looked odd as she was in men’s clothes) and said, “Gentle Dauphin, my name is Joan the Maid. The King of Heaven sends me to you with the message that you shall be anointed and crowned in the city of Rheims.”

Charles made one last effort to mislead her. “I am not the king, Joan,” he said. Pointing to the impostor he said “There is the king.”

Joan would not be deceived. “In God’s name, Sire,” she said, “it is you and no one else.”

At last Charles gave up the charade. He took Joan aside for a private conversation. To prove that she had been sent by God she told the Dauphin the three things he had prayed for on All Saints’ Day 1428. Then she set his mind at rest about his legitimacy: he was indeed the son and heir of the late King Charles VI. Queen Isabeau may not have been sure who was her son’s father, but God knew.

Charles was impressed but still cautious. Joan wanted him to give her an army to lead to Orleans. Instead he gave her a room in the chateau, a little boy to be her page, and introduced her to his handsome 23-year-old cousin, the Duke d’Alencon. Alencon and Joan liked each other at once. Throughout her brief career he would be Joan’s loyal ally.

For six weeks the Dauphin dawdled about what to do. Meanwhile Alencon gave her a war horse, and the priests at the Church of St. Catherine in Fierbois sent Joan a sword they found buried behind the altar. An armorer made white armor for her, and Hamish Power, a Scottish painter living in France, made a banner according to Joan’s design: white satin fringed with silk and on it painted an image of Our Lord attended by two angels with the words “{ln:Jesus} Maria.”

At the Dauphin’s command Joan submitted to an examination from a panel of churchmen at Poitiers. The surviving record of the examination reveals Joan’s impatience with anyone, regardless of rank, who did not share her absolute certainty that she was an instrument of Heaven. Her answers to the churchmen’s questions were curt, even insulting. When she was questioned by Carmelite Father Pierre Seguin what language her voices spoke, Joan answered, “A better language than yours.” Father Seguin, who came from the south of France, spoke a Limousin dialect that would have sounded rough and rustic to Joan whose dialect was closer to standard French. Impertinence however is not heresy. Father Seguin and his colleagues reported to the Dauphin that Joan was a good Catholic, that they believed she had been sent by God to give new hope to the people of France.

In April 1429 Joan set out at last for Orleans. She rode at the head of about 3500 fighting men in her white armor, the sword of St. Catherine sheathed at her side, her white banner in her hand. Joan’s brothers Jean and Pierre marched with her—they had come from Domremy to join her army.

In fact Joan was not the military commander of this force; she was its inspiration. Nonetheless she interfered in all the military councils. She also demanded that the commanders dismiss the army’s female camp followers and with all their men go to confession. Many of Joan’s biographers express surprise that these proud, rough fighting men did as they were told. It is not surprising at all. Joan’s army was waiting for a miracle. Leaving the camp followers behind and going to confession was a small price to pay to see the hand of God strike the English.

Orleans had been besieged for six months when Joan arrived. The commander of the town, Jean the Bastard of Orleans (so-called because he was the illegitimate son of the Duke of Orleans), came out to greet Joan and escort her into his beleaguered city. There huge crowd of citizens and soldiers bearing torches (it was nightfall by the time Joan rode into Orleans) were waiting for Joan. As she road through the city gate, the crowd pressed forward to touch her armor, her banner, even her white horse. She was their deliverer, their saint.

It took eight days of bloody fighting before Joan’s army finally drove the English away from Orleans. Joan herself was wounded in the fight, struck by an iron-tipped arrow above her left breast. On the night of her victory, while the church bells rang and the all the citizens of Orleans celebrated their deliverance, Joan returned to her lodging, had her bandage changed, ate a few slices if bread dipped in diluted wine, then went to sleep.

With Orleans liberated Joan moved on to her next task: bringing the Dauphin to Rheims for his coronation. Charles was truly delighted that Joan had driven off the English, but making the journey to Rheims was another matter. He complained that the way was not safe, that the English held too many towns between Chinon and Rheims.

To reassure their nervous prince Joan, the Bastard of Orleans, and the Duke d’Alencon led an army into the Loire Valley to clear out every English stronghold along the road to Rheims. With each town that fell to Joan French morale increased, while the English assured themselves that they were not battling a peasant girl but a disciple of the Devil, “a limb of the Fiend,” as the Duke of Bedford called her.

Once the road was as safe as Joan and her allies could make it Charles consented to ride to Rheims.

On July 17, 1429, a magnificent procession led Charles through the city streets to the Cathedral of Rheims where the Archbishop was waiting. Inside the church a vast assembly of knights, nobles, and prelates escorted Charles to the altar. None of them attracted as much attention however as Joan. Dressed in her white armor, her banner in her hand, she stood beside her gentle Dauphin as the Archbishop placed the crown of France on his head. Only five months had passed since she left her parents’ cottage in Domremy in obedience to her voices.

With Orleans safe, the Loire Valley free of the English, and the crown firmly on his head, Charles felt at ease perhaps for the first time in his life. Joan pleaded with him to send her to Paris to drive the English out of the French capital, but Charles put her off. He had a letter from the Duke of Burgundy, England’s most powerful ally in France, offering a truce, possibly a permanent peace. A peace treaty appealed to Charles’ cautious nature, but it filled Joan with dismay. Her voices had commanded her to drive the English out of France entirely, not to arrive at some accommodation with them. Meanwhile the English were reinforcing Paris.

At the end of August, when Charles at last agreed to let Joan and d’Alencon attack Paris, the English position was stronger than ever. To no one’s surprise, the French army was driven back.

The in wake of Joan’s first defeat her friend d’Alencon returned home to his wife and her army disbanded. Over the next year she was permitted a wage few small battles, but it was clear to everyone, Joan included, that Charles had lost interest in her. He wondered what to do with a saint once she had served her purpose; the problem was solved for him outside the walls of Compiegne.

Directly across the river from the French-held city of Compiegne was a small fortress manned by Burgundian troops. Joan and two or three hundred men tried to capture the outpost, and it appeared that they would succeed when a larger Burgundian force arrived. Outnumbered the French retreated to the safety of the city walls. Joan and few others, including her brother Pierre, covered her men’s retreat but before Joan and her small party could reach safety someone inside Compiegne raised the drawbridge. Joan was trapped outside the city. In seconds she was surrounded by Burgundian soldiers, each one shouting, “Yield to me!” Ultimately it was an archer who dragged Joan to the ground and won the honor of having captured the Maid of Orleans. We don’t know who the man was: the chroniclers who recorded the archer’s exploit failed to write down his name.

Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was jubilant when he learned that his men had taken Joan prisoner. For safekeeping he locked her in a tower of Beaurevoir Castle, the home of his vassal John of Luxembourg. John’s wife Jeanne de Bethune, his elderly aunt Jeanne de Luxembourg, and his step-daughter Jeanne de Bar, were all kind to Joan and tried to make her comfortable. Perhaps urged on by the ladies John of Luxembourg gave Joan access to the flat roof of her tower where she could get some fresh air and enjoy the sunlight. The three Jeannes tried to persuade her to put on women’s clothes, but she declined as politely as she could, saying the King of Heaven had not instructed her yet to give up men’s attire.

The kindnesses of her jailers did nothing however to assuage Joan’ s two constant anxieties: what would happen to her, and what would happen to Compiegne now that it was threatened by the Burgundians. One night she climbed to the roof of the tower, commended herself to God and the Blessed Virgin, and jumped. It was a seventy foot drop to the ground. When morning came the castle guards found Joan lying crumpled and unconscious in the dry moat: she had survived with only a concussion.

When Joan regained conscious and found herself back in her tower room, she nearly despaired. She refused all food. Only after St. Catherine came to her with the assurance that Compiegne would not fall did Joan take comfort and begin to eat.

The Duke of Burgundy had set a ransom of ten thousand livres for his prisoner. When the money arrived it was not from Charles, but from the English. After seven months of relatively comfortable captivity among the Luxembourgs Joan was taken to Rouen, a city still in English hands.

In Rouen she was treated like a common criminal. Leg irons hobbled her movements. It is not clear if she had a bed. Her guards were five English soldiers of the lowest sort who harassed her endlessly. She endured the humiliation of having her virginity verified in an examination conducted by the Duchess of Bedford and several midwives. And she was forbidden to hear Mass.

The indictment against Joan was religious rather than civil in nature. French prelates and theologians who had given their support to the English would examine her on charges of sorcery, idolatry, and heresy. Joan’s primary judge was Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais. In the best of times he was a cold man, and he had a special grudge against Joan. The year before when the French had retaken Beauvais Bishop Cauchon had been forced to flee to Rouen. In Beauvais he had lived as a prince of the Church, now he lived as an exile and refugee dependent on the charity of strangers. To Cauchon it must have appeared miraculous that the one person he blamed for his current galling situation should have been captured in his diocese and sent to him for sentencing.

Although she could not go to Mass Joan was given a confessor. The priests appointed could not have been worse. Nicolas Loiselleur passed himself off as a fellow countryman, the better to win Joan’s confidence. Not only did he repeat to the lawyers for the prosecution what Joan told him in confession, he concealed notaries and other witnesses in an adjoining room where a spy hole let them hear everything the poor, frightened prisoner said.

The scandalous conduct of Father Loiselleur was only one facet of that mockery of justice that passed as Joan’s trial. Under Bishop Cauchon a majestic ecclesiastical court was assembled in Rouen. The Judges were Cauchon and John Lemaistre, prior of the Dominicans in Rouen. Five other bishops, three abbots, and the English cardinal, Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester also attended, while 48 doctors of theology, 42 doctors of canon and civil law, 7 physicians, and 55 priests, religious laybrothers, and clerics participated in the process. For her part Joan had no canon lawyer arguing her defense, she was not permitted to call any witnesses to testify on her behalf, nor were any of the churchmen in the court permitted to explain the difficult questions of law and theology put to her during the trial.

The entire procedure was a farce with Cauchon shouting down any churchman in the hall who insisted that Joan be treated fairly. One of the Judges, the Dominican prior Lemaistre, hated the whole affair; Cauchon commanded him to do as he was told. When a doctor of theology, Jean Lefevre, objected to one of the questions put to Joan, Cauchon ordered a to “be silent in the Devil’s name.” Jean de la Fontaine, one of the canon lawyers prosecuting Joan, had to leave Rouen abruptly after he gave her some advice on how to defend herself against her accusers.

Cauchon was not the only menace in the court. On one occasion when Joan was asked if she would submit herself to the judgment of the {ln:Pope} , she replied yes. Father Isambart de la Pierre, a Dominican, advised her to correct herself and say that she would submit to the judgment of the General Council at Basel since there she would find many members of her party. The Englishmen in the room closed in on Father de la Pierre, threatening to throw him into the Seine if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.

Joan had no hope of justice in such a court. Her Judges described her visions as diabolical, the theology faculty of the University of Paris weighed in with the opinion that everything Joan had said about her mission was poisonous to Christian souls. Bishop Cauchon’s court handed down the decision the English wanted to hear: Joan was a heretic, a sorceress, a schismatic, and an apostate.

On May 24 an enormous crowd crammed itself into the cemetery adjacent to the Abbey of Saint Omer. Two platforms had been erected in the graveyard: on one stood Bishop Cauchon, Cardinal Beaufort, and a host of churchmen and English lords. On the other platform stood Joan, still in men’s clothes. Alone and surrounded by people who hated her, Joan heard the churchmen excommunicate her and deliver her over to the secular authorities to be burned alive. In terror for her life, with no friends or advisors to help her, Joan adjured everything she had said about her voices and her mission and signed a recantation. She agreed to wear women’s dress again. In return Cauchon lifted the excommunication and sentenced Joan to life imprisonment.

A repentant Joan was not what the English wanted, they wanted her burned. Once she was back in her cell one of the guards tore the dress off Joan and threw men’s clothes at her. That was all it took to declare Joan a relapsed heretic and sentence her to the flames.

The one act of charity Joan’s Judges showed her was to send Father Martin Ladvenu to hear her confession and give her Holy Communion on the morning of her execution. Afterward he accompanied her to the stake.

The English were so eager to burn Joan they did not even wait for Bishop Cauchon to formally hand her over to the secular authorities. No sooner had he pronounced her a heretic than soldiers seized her, dragged her to the top of the pyre, and bound her to the stake. She begged for a cross, and while Father Isambart de la Pierre ran to the nearby Church of the Holy Savior to fetch a processional crucifix, an English soldier took a stick, snapped it into pieces, and made a cross for Joan. She took it from his hand, kissed it, then slipped it under her gown between her breasts. As the flames rose around her, Joan cried, “{ln:Jesus}! {ln:Jesus}!’ while Father Isambart held the cross as high as he could so she could see it in her final agony. When the fire had burned itself out, the Ashes were collected and dumped into the Seine.

Twenty-five years after Joan’s death her mother Isabelle and her brothers Jean and Pierre petitioned Rome to revisit the case. In 1456 Joan’s case was heard once again, this time in Paris’ Cathedral of Notre Dame. An enormous crowd of Joan’s friends and supporters filled the church as witness after witness testified that Joan was pious, orthodox, and as true a daughter of the Faith as the Catholic Church had ever known.

Joan’s vindication was pronounced at Rouen where she had been wrongly executed. Her brother Jean and Father Ladvenu who had heard Joan’s last confession were present on the day the Archbishop of Rheims read a public statement denouncing the sentence against Joan as “tainted with fraud, calumny, iniquity, contradiction and manifest errors of fact and of law.”

From the day of her death Joan was widely venerated in France as a visionary, a hero, an innocent crushed by corrupt and malicious men, both lay and clerical. Her rehabilitation was complete in 1920 when {ln:Pope} Benedict XV canonized Joan. In 1922, his successor {ln:Pope} Pius XI named Joan patron of France.

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