Burned by the church she died for
Joan of Arc's execution
The trial of Joan of Arc lasts five months. The charge is heresy — specifically, wearing men's clothes, claiming direct divine authority, and refusing to submit her visions to the judgment of the church.
The trial is conducted by Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais, who is in the pay of the English. The outcome is predetermined.
Joan defends herself with extraordinary intelligence and composure. Untrained in theology, illiterate, nineteen years old, she parries the questions of the doctors of theology with answers that repeatedly wrong-foot her accusers. When asked whether she is in a state of grace, she says: If I am, God keep me in it. If I am not, God bring me to it. The question — designed to entrap her, since only God knows the state of a soul — is brilliantly deflected.
She is convicted. She recants, briefly, under the threat of burning — then retracts the recantation. She is condemned as a relapsed heretic.
On May 30, 1431 AD, she is led to the Old Market Square in Rouen and burned at the stake. She is nineteen years old.
She asks for a cross to be held before her as the flames rise. An English soldier makes a small cross from two sticks and gives it to her.
She asks repeatedly for Jesus.
Twenty-three years later, a posthumous retrial ordered by Charles VII — the king who abandoned her — declares her innocent of all charges. In 1920 the Catholic church canonizes her as a saint.
The church that burned her made her a saint.
Historical institutions are very complicated.
“Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”
— Joan of Arc, her last words, May 30, 1431 AD
“They stoned Stephen, as he called on the Lord, saying, Lord Jesus, receive my Spirit! He kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, don't hold this sin against them! When he had said this, he fell asleep.”
Her last word was his name.
Not France. Not the Dauphin. Not a curse on her executioners. Not a declaration of innocence. Just the name — repeated, escalating, the final expression of the one thing that had been true underneath everything else.
Joan had said from the beginning that the voices she heard were holy, that the mission was God's, that she was doing what she was sent to do. In the end, surrounded by fire, the last thing her voice could form was the name of the one who sent her.
Stephen dies calling on the Lord Jesus. Joan dies calling on the Lord Jesus. Across fourteen centuries, the same name on the dying lips of people who gave everything for the one who bore it.
What name is at the center of you? And would it be the last thing you said?