- "Born at Domremy in Champagne, probably on 6 January, 1412; died at Rouen, 30 May, 1431....Jacques d'Arc, Joan's father [No wiseguys, her father was NOT Noah d'Arc!], was a small peasant farmer....It was at the age of thirteen and a half, in the summer of 1425, that Joan first became conscious of that manifestation...which she afterwards came to call her 'voices' or her 'counsel'....by May, 1428, she no longer doubted that she was bidden to go to the help of the king, and the voices became insistent....From the beginning a strong party at the court...opposed her as a crazy visionary, but a secret sign, communicated to her by her voices, which she made known to Charles, led the king, somewhat half-heartedly, to believe in her mission....it is now most commonly believed that this 'secret of the king' was a doubt Charles had conceived of the legitimacy of his birth, and which Joan had been supernaturally authorized to set at rest....
"before Joan could be employed in military operations she was sent to Poitiers to be examined by a numerous committee of learned bishops and doctors. The examination was of the most searching and formal character....All that we know is that her ardent faith, simplicity, and honesty made a favourable impression. The theologians found nothing heretical in her claims to supernatural guidance, and, without pronouncing upon the reality of her mission, they thought that she might be safely employed and further tested.
"perhaps the most interesting fact connected with this early stage of her mission is a letter of one Sire de Rotslaer written from Lyons on 22 April, 1429, which was delivered at Brussels and duly registered, as the manuscript to this day attests, before any of the events referred to received their fulfilment. The Maid, he reports, said 'that she would save Orléans and would compel the English to raise the siege, that she herself in a battle before Orléans would be wounded by a shaft but would not die of it, and that the King, in the course of the coming summer, would be crowned at Reims, together with other things which the King keeps secret.'
"Before entering upon her campaign, Joan summoned the King of England to withdraw his troops from French soil. The English commanders were furious at the audacity of the demand, but Joan by a rapid movement entered Orléans on 30 April. Her presence there at once worked wonders....on Sunday, 17 July, 1429, Charles VII was solemnly crowned, the Maid standing by with her standard....
"[Moving ahead, Joan was to later be taken prisoner.]. No words can adequately describe the disgraceful ingratitude and apathy of Charles and his advisers in leaving the Maid to her fate....There can be no doubt that the English, partly because they feared their prisoner with a superstitious terror, partly because they were ashamed of the dread which she inspired, were determined at all costs to take her life. They could not put her to death for having beaten them, but they could get her sentenced as a witch and a heretic....
"On 29 May a court of thirty-seven judges decided unanimously that the Maid must be treated as a relapsed heretic, and this sentence was actually carried out the next day (30 May, 1431)....Her demeanour at the stake was such as to move even her bitter enemies to tears. She asked for a cross, which, after she had embraced it, was held up before her while she called continuously upon the name of Jesus. 'Until the last,' said Manchon, the recorder at the trial, 'she declared that her voices came from God and had not deceived her'....
"Twenty-four years later a revision of her trial, the procès de réhabilitation, was opened at Paris with the consent of the Holy See....an appellate court constituted by the pope, after long inquiry and examination of witnesses, reversed and annulled the sentence pronounced by a local tribunal under Cauchon's presidency. The illegality of the former proceedings was made clear, and it speaks well for the sincerity of this new inquiry that it could not be made without inflicting some degree of reproach upon both the King of France and the Church at large, seeing that so great an injustice had been done and had so long been suffered to continue unredressed.... St. Joan was canonized in 1920 by Pope Benedict XV."
With regard to the 1999 film, Joan of Arc, the USCCB says that it gives "a muddled account....depicting Joan as a national rather than religious heroine whose faith in her saintly voices registers little dramatic conviction." By contrast, the 1928 silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, has been very favorably cited by the Vatican!
