By Kristen Ziccarelli
On her feast day, today May 30, Joan of Arc is remembered as one of the greatest saints not only of her time, but of all time. The Maid of Orleans inspires us all with her military victories for France, her courage in battle, and her extraordinary judgment and martyrdom.
Yet the most important thing about Joan was none of those things, but the fact that she was obsessed with the will of God. As Alexandre Havard writes from her perspective in Coached by Joan of Arc: Lessons in Virtuous Leadership: “my love for France was not the fruit of extreme patriotism. It is true that my father was a patriot. However, what obsessed me was the will of God. My patriotism did not give rise to my visions; my visions gave rise to my patriotism. My voices advised me to do things I could not imagine; they ordered me to do things I found repulsive. I felt pity for the French because God felt pity for them. I loved France for God’s sake.”
At her canonization in 1920, the apostolic constitution Divina disponente of Pope Benedict XV declared that Saint Joan of Arc would be added to the “number of the Saints, so that, from her example, all Christians may learn that obedience to the will of God is holy and devout, and obtain from her the grace to convert their fellow citizens to attain heavenly life.”
At the age of thirteen, Joan began to receive visions from God and the saints. France at that time was fractured by the Hundred Years’ War. England had claimed much of northern France, including Paris, and the French throne itself remained vacant. As the English besieged the city of Orléans along the Loire River, the nation seemed on the brink of collapse.
Illiterate and little more than a girl, at eighteen Joan sought the help of her uncle to bring her before the Dauphin, the future Charles VII. She told him she had been sent by God “to raise the siege of Orléans and help you recover your kingdom. God wills it so.”
Against all earthly expectation, Joan helped lead the French forces to a series of victories against the English and safely escorted Charles to Reims, where he was crowned in the cathedral as King of France in 1429. On May 30, 1431, she was tried and burned at the stake for “heresy” in Rouen.
Both in 1431 and now, nearly 600 years after her trial, the distinction between patriotism and obedience matters enormously. Her response of serving God faithfully in the concrete circumstances in which He placed her changed the course of history.
Many devout believers are often tempted toward one of two extremes. Some withdraw entirely from public life, convinced that withdrawal is nobler or exhausted by the civic decline they witness around them. Others immerse themselves so deeply in political identity that faith becomes secondary to partisan loyalty. Reading the documents of her trial or the numerous accounts of her life makes it clear that Saint Joan of Arc possessed no partisan soul, nor did she fight for the nation as an end in itself.
That is the kind of patriotism that is deeply Christian, because it neither ignores a nation’s failures nor idolizes national identity. Instead, it asks what the will of God is: discerning our duty to our own (those closest to us in our neighbors, our communities, and our country). Saint Joan of Arc understood that love of country could become a form of Christian service when rightly ordered by a prior love of God.
The life of Saint Joan of Arc also helps us recover a richer understanding of the virtue of piety. Saint Thomas Aquinas describes piety as the virtue by which we render “duty and homage to our parents and to our country.”
Patriotism need not be reduced to an ideology or discarded altogether. Joan presents another path, where love of country, rightly ordered, can be understood as gratitude toward those who came before us, a kind of inheritance received rather than an invented identity.
The Christian West was built through centuries of sacrifice, faith, and holiness. A Christian can love his country not merely for political reasons, but also out of gratitude toward those who handed on the institutions, culture, and faith that allow us to live freely today. Love of country, then, becomes not an idol but a natural affection elevated toward love of neighbor and, ultimately, toward love of Christ.
Even the end of Joan’s life reveals the difference between mere nationalism and true Christian fidelity. Ultimately, she was betrayed by her own countrymen when the Duke of Burgundy yielded to political pressure and handed her over to the English. If Joan’s mission had been rooted solely in patriotism, her story would end in tragedy and disappointment. Instead, her witness endured because her loyalty was never finally placed in political victory, but in the will of God.
Joan thus demonstrates that holiness involves entering into the many difficulties of the world with clarity, humility, and courage. Her magnanimity, or her “greatness of soul,” calls her to cultivate the gifts God gave her and to use them for the Kingdom. Though young and uneducated, she trusted fully that God could act through her for purposes greater than herself.
American Catholics have many significant national ties to Saint Joan of Arc: one of which is found in the longest church in our nation. On May 16, 1920, the day of Saint Joan of Arc’s canonization, the ground was blessed for the future Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Today, the Chapel of Our Lady of Lourdes, at the crypt level, contains a white marble stone from the dungeon where Joan was imprisoned before her execution.
This is also a reminder of her Marian devotion and of a spirituality forged by trusting obedience: the same disposition we see most perfectly in Our Lady: a simple “yes” to what she believed God was asking of her.
About the author
Kristen Ziccarelli is a writer living in Washington, D.C.