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St. Joan of Arc — The Saint Officially Burned Over a Change of Clothes · Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast

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  A 17-year-old peasant girl walked into a royal court full of grown men in the middle of a
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  war and told the future King of France that God had sent her to save his country. He should
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  have laughed her out of the room. Instead, within a year, she had broken a siege the greatest
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  generals in France couldn't break and put a crown on his head himself. Two years after
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  that, the same country she saved burned her alive. And here's the detail almost nobody
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  remembers correctly. By our own sworn testimony, in our own words, under oath, she never killed
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  a single person.
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  Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. This is episode 19. If you're new here,
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  welcome to the porch. Pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee or a lemonade and stick around.
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  We look at a new saint every Thursday. Quick heads up, I am still knee deep in moving boxes,
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  so bear with me things sound a little different around here for just a few more weeks. And
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  before we get into it, if you haven't already, hit follow or subscribe wherever you are listening.
• 1:18
  takes five seconds and means a lot to a show like this. Stick with me today because before
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  we are done, we're going to play another round of True or Legend and sort out what's actually
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  verified about Joan of Arc from what's been just repeated so many times, it sounds true.
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  And then we'll land back on the porch, which if I'm honest, is my favorite part of doing
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  the show every week. You already know this name. This is the story of St. Joan of Arc. Joan
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  was born around 1412 in a small farming village called Donnerymi in the northeast of France.
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  Her father was a tenant farmer. Nobody in that family had ever touched a sword or sat in a
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  royal court or expected to matter to anyone outside their own village. France, meanwhile,
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  was in the middle of falling apart. The Hundred Years War had been dragging on for generations
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  and by the time Joan was a teenager, England... backed by a powerful fraction of French nobles
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  who had turned against their own king, controlled most of the North, including Paris itself.
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  The rightful heir to the French throne, a young man named Charles, hadn't been officially
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  crowned. He was just the dolphin, a king in name only, hiding out in the parts of France
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  the English hadn't taken yet. Around the age of 13, standing in her father's garden, Joan
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  said she heard a voice, then more than one. She would later testify that the voices belong
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  to the St. Michael the Archangel, St. Catherine of Alexandria, and St. Margaret of Antioch.
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  At first, she said the message was simple. Pray more, go to church, live a good life, ordinary
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  advice for a devout peasant girl. But the message didn't stay simple. Over the next few years,
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  it sharpened into something enormous. Go to the Dauphin. help him drive the English out
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  of France, see him properly crowned at Reims, the city where French kings had been crowned
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  for centuries, a city currently sitting deep inside enemy territory. A 13-year-old girl
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  who couldn't read or write was hearing that she was supposed to fix a war that had already
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  broken two generations of professional soldiers. Here's something the popular image of Joan
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  of Arc usually skips right past. Before she ever picked up a weapon, her hardest fight
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  was just getting anyone with power to take her seriously. She first went to a local garrison
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  commander named Robert de Baudricourt and told him God wanted her to see the Dauphin. His
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  answer, according to the record, was to tell her cousin to take her home and give her a
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  good whipping. She went back anyway. This time she told Baudricourt something specific, that
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  the King's army had just suffered a defeat outside Orleans. Days later, arrived confirming she
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  had been right before any messenger could possibly have reached her with that news first. That's
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  what finally got Baudricourt's attention. He agreed to send her to the Dauphin with an armed
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  escort on an 11-day ride through hostile territory. To make the journey safer, Joan cut her hair
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  short and dressed as a man, a practical decision for travel that would come back around later
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  in the story in a much darker way. When she arrived at the royal court in the town of Shenan,
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  the Dauphin decided to test her. According to multiple accounts from the period, he disguised
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  himself among his own courtiers and put someone else in his place so that if Joan really had
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  been sent by God, she would have known the real king without being told. She walked into that
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  crowded room and went straight to Charles, bowing to him immediately and not to decoy. I want
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  to be honest with you about this detail though. That part of the story comes from later storytellers,
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  not from Joan's own sworn trial testimony. Under oath, she was tight-lipped about it, saying
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  only that she'd given the king a private sign nobody else knew about. So the disguise and
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  decoy version is a long-standing historical tradition. Genuinely old, genuinely widely
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  reported, but not something she confirmed herself under oath in her own words. Whatever actually
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  happened in that room, well, it worked and Charles gave her the troops. In the spring of 1429,
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  Joan rode toward the besieged city of Orleans, the key to whether France would survive as
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  an independent country or not. She told the king ahead of time that she would be wounded
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  by an arrow during the fighting and she was. Within days, the siege that had been going
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  on for months was broken. French morale, which had been collapsing for years, turned almost
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  overnight. City after city that had surrendered to the English began declaring for Charles
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  instead. That July, Joan got the things she'd been promised from the very beginning. Charles
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  was crowned King of France in the cathedral at Reims with Joan standing beside him. A peasant
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  girl who couldn't read had walked a broken king into the one ceremony that made him legitimate
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  in the eyes of his own country. Joan's momentum didn't last. In 1430, during a skirmish outside
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  the town of Campion, she was captured by Burgundian forces, Frenchmen allied with the English.
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  And instead of ransoming her back to her own king the way captured nobility usually were,
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  the Burgundians sold her to the English. Now, the English couldn't simply execute her as
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  a prisoner of war. That would have made her a martyr for the French cause, and worse, it
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  would have raised an uncomfortable question. If Joan was a fraud or a witch, then what did
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  that make the king she had crowned? So instead, they needed her refuted, condemned by the
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  church itself, not just by a battlefield enemy. They arranged a trial for heresy in front of
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  a church court-stacked with a pro-English clergy, led by a bishop named Pierre Cochon, who was,
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  not coincidentally, being paid by the English crown for his trouble. The trial? ran for months.
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  Joan, a teenage girl with no formal education, was interrogated again and again by trained
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  theologians trying to trap her into a sacrilegious statement. Over and over, the record shows
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  her answering with a kind of sharpness that nobody expected. There's a specific exchange
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  from the trial worth sitting with for a second. She was asked, point blank, whether she believed
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  she was in a state of grace, meaning roughly, whether God approved of her. It's a theological
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  trap with no safe answer. Say yes, and you have committed the sin of presumption, claiming
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  certainty only God can know. Say no, and you have just confessed to being outside God's
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  favor, exactly the kind of admission her judges needed to convict her of heresy. A trained
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  theologian could spend years being coached on how to dodge that question. Joan, a teenager,
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  who had never spent a second in a classroom answered, if she wasn't in God's grace, she
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  prayed God would put her there. And if she was, she prayed God would keep her there. Even the
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  men trying to convict her reportedly had no good response to that. Eventually, worn down
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  after months of this, she signed a confession recanting her claims. But then within days,
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  she went back to wearing men's clothing. Clothing? she had been explicitly forbidden from wearing
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  again. And that single detail, that specific relapse, became the official charge that sent
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  her to be condemned. On May 30th, 1431, Joan was led into the marketplace of Rouen and burned
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  at the stake. She was around 19 years old. Witnesses reported that she asked for a cross to hold
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  as she died and that she repeatedly called out the name of Jesus. until she could no longer
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  speak. She was 19. She led an army, crowned a king, and reshaped the outcome of a war that
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  had already outlasted her own parents' entire lifetimes. And it had taken barely two years,
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  start to finish. Before we head back to the porch, let's play our game again. Three claims
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  about Joan. Some hold up under real scrutiny, some do not. Claim number one, in her own sworn
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  trial testimony, stated that she had never personally killed anyone in battle and that
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  she carried her banner instead of a weapon specifically to avoid it. Claim number two, when Charles
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  VII first tested Joan by disguising himself among his courtiers, Joan herself later confirmed
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  under oath in detail exactly how she recognized him. Claim number three, The official charge
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  that sent Joan back to be executed was that she had gone back to wearing a men's clothing
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  after her greening to stop. All right, got your guesses? Here we go. Claim number one is true,
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  and it's not even a matter of interpretation. This is Joan in her own words from the trial
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  record itself, and I quote, I loved my banner 40 times better than my sword. And when I went
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  against my enemy, I carried my banner myself. lest I kill any, I have never killed a man."
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  The armored warrior swinging a sword through enemy lines is the image most of us have in
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  our heads, but it isn't the one she gave us herself. Claim number two is legend, or at
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  least unconfirmed. The disguise story is old and told by multiple storytellers close to
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  her own lifetime. I'm not saying it's invented out of nothing, But when Joan herself was asked
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  about it under oath at trial, she gave almost nothing away. She said only that she'd given
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  the king a private sign. The vivid specific version, Joan striding past the decoy straight
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  to the real king, comes from secondhand accounts, not her own sworn words. Claim number three
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  is true, and it's the one that should bother you a little. The official church record really
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  does anchor her final condemnation on the technicality of her clothing. But most historians don't
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  think that was really about fabric. They think the men running the trial wanted her discredited
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  and controlled, and the relapse gave them the excuse they needed. Joan's own reason for putting
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  the clothing back on was likely far more practical. It may have offered real protection from assault.
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  Alone in a cell with no other women present. On paper though, it is the official church
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  record. Clothing is what did it. All right, back to the porch. The thing that keeps catching
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  me about Joan isn't the war or even the fire. It's that one line, I have never killed a man.
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  Here's a girl. who did more to turn a war around than most generals manage in a lifetime. And
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  when she finally got to describe herself in her own words, she didn't reach for the sword,
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  she reached for her banner, the thing that let her fight without killing anyone. That's not
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  how we usually tell her story. We want the warrior, the armor, the sword, the girl who did the
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  violent thing and did it better than the men around her. It's a cleaner story. If it's a
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  poster, it's just not the story she told about herself. I think there's something worth sitting
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  within that gap between the story people remember and the story the person actually lived. Most
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  of us aren't going to lead an army or get burned at a stake for it, but most of us have some
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  version of that same gap. The version of you other people decided on long time ago and the
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  quieter, truer version underneath it that only you actually know. Joan didn't get to correct
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  a record in her own lifetime. It took 25 years and a pope's authority just to get the church
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  to admit what she had said all along was true. Most of us won't wait that long, but I think
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  it's the same instinct. When you know what's true about yourself, you don't need the crowd's
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  version to win. You just keep telling the truth. plainly and let it outlast whoever's got the
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  wrong story. And this doesn't show up only in the big dramatic version. It shows up in smaller
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  rooms too. It's the version of you a family member decided on years ago and never bothered
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  updating. It's a bad year at a job that still follows you around long after you have become
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  somebody different. It's getting called the difficult one or the one who never follows
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  through over something that stopped being true before anybody noticed. Nobody's calling a
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  tribunal for that. It just gets corrected quietly by you being the truer version out loud in
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  ordinary rooms for long enough that people can't keep ignoring it. That's a slower kind of courage
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  than standing in front of a bishop who wants you dead. I don't think it's a smaller one.
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  Nobody's writing it down while it's happening, So here's what I'm sitting with this week.
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  Where's the gap? In your own life, between what people assume about you and what you actually
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  know is true. And are you willing to just keep saying the quieter, truer thing, even if nobody's
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  ready to believe it yet? It is now time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for Joan
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  and for the courage it took to stand in front of grown men trying to destroy her and simply
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  keep telling the truth. For anyone listening who feels like the world has decided who they
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  are without ever actually asking, give them Joan's steadiness. Let them keep telling the
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  truth about themselves patiently, even if it takes 25 years for anyone else to believe it.
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  Amen. Saint Joan of Arc is recognized as the patron saint of France, of soldiers and of
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  prisoners and those persecuted for their faith. She was canonized in 1920 by Pope Benedict
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  XV. Her feast day is celebrated on May 30th. Well, that is episode 19. If this one surprised
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  you, the way it surprised me putting it together, send it to somebody who thinks they already
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  know the story of Joan of Arc. Next week, we are back to an unknown saint, and I promise
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  you, once you hear this one, you will wonder why you never knew the name before. I'm John
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  O'Connor, thanks for sitting on the porch with me, and I will see you next week.