The Irrepressibility of Innocence

"It was clear to everyone that she had been innocent all along. Indeed, her voices were real; all the evidence pointed to an afflatus from God Himself, entrusting her with a mission to save France from its enemies."

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Who was this extraordinary young woman, Joan of Arc? And why should it matter that, nearly six centuries after her death, that homage be paid to her memory? 

Born 1883, Gertrude Hill was a child of privilege. She was the youngest daughter of 10 children sired by James J. Hill, one of the richest and most powerful men in America, who made his fortune laying down a railroad from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Seattle, Washington, a distance of more than 1,700 miles. And when she married at the turn of the last century, she took her inheritance and bought a 15th-century French Renaissance Chateau, every stone of which she had shipped across the ocean to her estate on Long Island.

But that wasn’t the only French import to adorn her property. In addition to the Chateau, which burned to the ground shortly after her death in 1961, she acquired a small gothic chapel of equal antiquity, which had stood since the early 1400s in the Rhône Valley southeast of Lyon. There she installed a stone relic said by all accounts to have been the kneeler where Joan of Arc, barely 18 years of age, prayed before going into battle to free France from the tyranny of an English king in 1429.

Miraculously, the chapel survived the fire and soon after was offered to Marquette University. Workers spent nine months dismantling the thing, and it arrived on the Milwaukee campus in 1964. At once, it became a shrine of devotion to one of the greatest saints of the last one-thousand years. It was there, years later, that I first came upon it, finding myself, like Joan, kneeling in a place of prayer where, as the poet T.S. Eliot reminds us, “you would have to put off / Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, / Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity / Or carry report. / You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.”  And the exercise of prayer, he adds, is something other,

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation 
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication 
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. 

So, who was this extraordinary young woman, Joan of Arc? And why should it matter that, nearly six centuries after her death, that homage be paid to her memory? What exact communication had she in mind when her whole body, “tongued with fire beyond the language of the living,” reaches out across the centuries to reveal her story? What is her story anyway, and has it any relevance to the stories we should be telling?

More to the point, what does it tell us about a Church that first sat in judgment upon her, condemning her as a heretic before turning her over to the secular arm to be burned alive for so many alleged sins of apostasy and witchcraft, only to adjudge her centuries later to have been a saint, proclaiming her alongside Thérèse of the Child Jesus as Patroness of France, Eldest Daughter of the Catholic Church?  

It is a stunning paradox, to be sure, of which the Danish film director Carl Dreyer was very much aware when, in 1928, he released The Passion of Joan of Arc, a haunting film depiction of her trial and execution, in which that very question is asked. The answer would come years later when, as he grew in wisdom, he came to see the Church precisely though that same lens of paradox. “The Church,” he explained,  

is made up of human beings, and that alone is all you need to have a moral debacle. But it is that same Church, through God’s grace and patience, that can set things straight. Even though the trial of Joan of Arc was not the Church’s high-water mark, she still preserved the minutes of the trial for the centuries that followed.

Such a remarkable fact that is, too. That for all the discredit the trial brought upon the human side of the Church, the archives of shame were kept intact by that same institution, so that, centuries after when the files were reopened, it was clear to everyone that she had been innocent all along. Indeed, her voices were real; all the evidence pointed to an afflatus from God Himself, entrusting her with a mission to save France from its enemies. 

“I look to my Judge,” she cried out before her judicial persecutors, “who is the King of Heaven and earth! Yes, I look to the Creator of all things! I love Him with all my heart.” Thus did the face of innocence show itself before a world arrayed against all its seeming helplessness.

Georges Bernanos, perhaps the most luminous literary figure of Catholic France, in a profound and moving essay on “Joan, Heretic and Saint,” written a few years following her canonization in 1920, perfectly understood what it was that her life and witness were about. “God made her,” he declared, “so that the world might not lose, with the divine miracle, a torrent of honor and poetry.” Just think. An ocean of grace, no less, coursing through her short life, irradiating an entire planet.  

To invest all for God, such is the stuff of sanctity. Meanwhile, most of us live entirely on the surface, moved less by ardor for God and neighbor than appetite for self. 

Bernanos lamented,

Most people engage only the feeblest part of themselves in life, a ridiculously tiny part of their being, like those wealthy misers who will spend only the interest their income earns. A saint doesn’t live on the interest…he lives on his capital, he gives all of his soul. 

Contrast the saint with those who live and die without engaging the soul at all, unable to muster enough spirit with which to mount even the least rampart of valor.

“What saints,” he asks, “have the other churches?”

Our Church is the Church of saints. Nowhere else could one even imagine the adventure—an adventure so human!—of a little heroine who one day passed quietly from the stake of the Inquisition to Paradise, under the noses of a hundred and fifty theologians.

And while none of us, Bernanos goes on to say, having to shoulder this or that burden of family or work, or even the nation itself, 

with our grief-worn faces and our roughened hands, with the unending boredom of our daily life, of daily bread to be fought for, and the honor of our homes to be defended…will ever have enough theology to become even a Canon…we have enough to become saints.

And not to be counted among the saints, as another great French writer, Léon Bloy, once put it, “is the only sadness.”