By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
One of the best parts of Catholic life is the opportunity to connect with the saints.
The enduring Catholic tradition of honoring and retelling stories about extraordinary people is spiritually uplifting. But it often also offers tools and guidance for navigating modern day life.
I share names with three Catholic saints—Michael, the courageous archangel, Patrick the persevering Irishman, and Francis the compassionate man from Assisi. Each inspires me in their own ways.
But I was born in the city (Orléans, France) that celebrates one of the most unlikely and fascinating saints of all—Joan of Arc.
Joan did not conform to either the class or gender norms of her day. An uneducated farm girl born over 600 years ago, she rose up to become a leader of her people during an era dominated by aristocratic men.
Joan spent her formative years living in Northeast France during the Hundred Years War. The century-long conflict was fought over the status of English territories in France (such as Burgundy) and English claims to the French throne.
Joan, her family, and her neighbors were all terrorized and displaced by the ongoing conflict. In early 1429, Joan managed to get an audience with King Charles VII, the man who inherited the throne of France under quite tenuous circumstances and lived in the Loire River Valley, about 75 miles south of Orléans.
Orléans was France’s second most important city. Three kings were crowned at the Cathédrale Sainte-Croix d’Orléans (Cathedral of the Holy Cross) and traditionally the Duchy of Orléans was the rightful inheritance of the French monarch’s second son.
In 1429, the seventeen-year-old Joan—saying she was guided by visions from the archangel Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine—convinced King Charles to send her to Orléans as part of a relief army. At the time, English armies surrounded and besieged Orléans.
Joan arrived at the city in late April 1429 wearing male clothing and armor. Instead of wielding a sword, she carried a banner depicting Jesus, two angels, and flowers…the fleur-de-lis (meaning “lily flower” in French).
She prayed each day in the Cathedral and wrote letters to the English army demanding that they leave. When the English laughed in response, Joan led the French out into battle carrying only her banner.
During one skirmish just outside Orléans, an English arrow hit Joan in the shoulder. She had the wound dressed and then immediately returned to the fight, once again carrying just her banner.
The unusual sight—and Joan’s remarkable courage—brought an unexpected surge of hope to the demoralized French army and to the people of the city. Nine days after Joan arrived in Orléans, the English abandoned the siege.
She led the French to victory in other battles too, but eventually Burgundian troops (allied with the English) captured her in May 1430. The English accused Joan of heresy for, among other things, wearing men’s clothes and acting upon allegedly demonic visions.
In a trial with a predetermined outcome, judges declared her guilty and later condemned her again because she continued wearing men’s clothes. On May 30, 1431, the English burned her at the stake in the public marketplace at Rouen (about 112 miles north of Orléans) and dumped her ashes into the Seine River.
She was only nineteen years old. Fortunately, hindsight saw Joan in a better light.
The Catholic Church overturned her guilty verdict, declaring that it was tainted by deceit and procedural errors. After the French Revolution that started in 1789, she became a national symbol of France.
Pope Benedict XV canonized her a saint in 1920, and two years later France named her one of its patron saints. Today, Joan is portrayed in numerous cultural works, including literature, music, paintings, sculptures, and theater.
My path crossed with Joan when my parents moved to the city she saved. In the late 1950s, my father was assigned to the 7th Weather U.S. Air Force Squadron at Saran Airfield, Orléans, some sixty miles south of Paris.
In May 1961, I arrived via special delivery at the American 34th General Army Hospital in the nearby village of La Chapelle-St. Mesmin. I don’t remember much about Orléans or France, but my family did.
One memory they often shared was about Joan of Arc and how Orléans celebrated her as the savior of the city. That celebration continues even today.
Since about 480 BC, Orleans has been home to Gauls, Romans, Normans, the French, and many others. During the Middle Ages, the city even survived a siege from Attila the Hun.
The city evolved into a center for learning and religion. King Francis II, also the royal consort of Scotland after his marriage to Mary Queen of Scots at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, died in the city’s Hôtel Groslot in 1560.
The Orléans Cathedral is famous in its own right—built on the ruins of a Roman temple beginning in 1278, partially destroyed in 1568 by the Huguenots, rebuilt in a Gothic style between 1601 and 1829, and restored again after heavy damage in World War II. France named it a national historic monument in 1862.
And yet, despite that remarkable history and architecture, Orléans most fondly remembers a farm woman who dressed like a man and stayed in the city for less than a month. Each year in late April and early May, the city sponsors a Joan of Arc festival.
My family attended when we were there in the 1960s and vividly recalls a light show depicting Joan and projected onto the Cathedral facade. That tribute in light and sound continues today.
A half-century after my birth, I finally made it back to Orléans in June 2018. We took a morning train from Paris, toured the magnificent Cathedral, and walked down to the Loire riverbank.
I tracked down the name/history of a local artist who painted a stunning landscape that I now own but my mother bought there 50 years before. It shows a bridge on the river with the Cathedral behind it.
We listened to live music as we ate lunch outside on the city’s main square and then bought macarons at a local bakery. Joan’s spirit is everywhere in Orléans, on statues, paintings, and on many lovely stained-glass panels in the Cathedral.
I have learned, over the years, that even non-Catholics who never lived in France love her. One of them is Mark Twain.
At a time when he arguably was anti-Catholic and did not really like the French, Twain wrote about Joan of Arc. He once described his 1896 novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte, as his best and favorite book.
Why? Twain once explained: “When we reflect that [Joan’s] century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities.”
Despite admirable progress in so many other areas of life, I am mystified and distressed that today we live in a world still quite eager to condemn people like Joan…people who don’t look like us, dress like us, act like us, or think like us.
Saint Joan of Arc reminds me about the basic but important lesson from the Bible’s Book of Genesis—we all are created in God’s image. Some 600 years after her remarkable and admirable life, it’s time to stop burning people at the stake.
(Photo by author of Joan of Arc painting in Orléans, France).
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
