St. Joan of Arc

May 30 is the feast of St. Joan of Arc (1412-1431), the peasant girl from Domrémy who heard the voices of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret and led the French army to lift the siege of Orléans in 1429. She was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, tried for heresy at Rouen, and burned at the stake on May 30, 1431, at the age of nineteen. Her ashes were thrown into the Seine.

The trial that condemned her was reopened by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, and the verdict was nullified. Joan was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920. Her principal shrine is Reims, where she led the dauphin Charles VII to his coronation in the cathedral on July 17, 1429 — the act that gave the Hundred Years' War its turn. The Cathedral of Notre-Dame at Reims, where every French king from Louis VIII to Charles X was crowned, is the natural pilgrimage of her feast.

The Basilica of Joan of Arc at Domrémy, the village of her birth, and the basilica at Rouen, built near the place of her execution, are the two poles of her geography. From Paris, where the Rue de Jeanne d'Arc marks her entry into the city in 1429, to Tours, where she met the dauphin, the feast of May 30 is a national as well as a religious memory in France.