St. Joan of Arc

Who they were

Joan was an illiterate farm girl from Domremy who, at seventeen, talked her way to the Dauphin of a collapsing France, was examined by theologians, and was given troops. She broke the siege of Orleans in nine days, drove the campaign that crowned the king at Reims, and was captured within the year. The court that tried her at Rouen was staffed by the enemy's partisans. The transcript survives, and her answers to seventy judges are still studied as the wonder of the trial: if I am not in God's grace, may God put me there; if I am, may God keep me there. Burned at nineteen, she asked for a cross held level with her eyes. A Church retrial in 1456 nullified the verdict entirely, and she was canonized in 1920. The transcripts of both trials make her one of the best documented lives of the entire Middle Ages.

Why people turn to St. Joan of Arc

Soldiers, and France. But her widest modern constituency is anyone condemned by a process that was rigged before it started: the slandered, the scapegoated, the person whose vindication is coming but not yet.

How to ask their intercession

When you are being judged unfairly and cannot yet prove it, ask her prayers for her two gifts: answers under pressure, and the patience of the 1456 retrial, which is vindication on God's calendar.