Joan of Arc

Jehanne Darc also known as Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) (1412 – 30 May 1431) was a mystic visionary, military leader, martyr, saint and heroine of France. Executed by fire as a heretic after sentencing by a tribunal of pro-English clergy, she was later cleared of the charges during an appellate trial of the Inquisition on 7 July 1456, and canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church on 16 May 1920.

Sourced

• Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.
  • Trial records (15 March 1431)

• You say that you are my judge. I do not know if you are! But I tell you that you must take good care not to judge me wrongly, because you will put yourself in great danger. I warn you, so that if God punishes you for it, I would have done my duty by telling you!
  • Jeanne's warning to Bishop Cauchon, Trial records (15 March 1431)

• Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.
  • As quoted in World Famous Women: Types of Female Heroism, Beauty, and Influence from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time (1881) by Frank Boott Goodrich, p. 126

• About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they're just one thing, and we shouldn't complicate the matter.
  • As quoted in The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994)

• If I am not in the state of grace, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.
  • Trial records

Quotes about Joan of Arc

• Jehanne... If you come from God, I do not fear you ... if you come from the Devil, I fear you even less.
  • Constable de Richemont, who went on to serve at her side in the Battle of Patay.

• Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang.
  • Sir Winston Churchill, in The Birth of Britain

• God forgive us: we have burned a saint.
  • Reported words of an English soldier after the execution.

• Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it
  • Mark Twain

• If Joan had been malicious, selfish, cowardly, or stupid, she would have been one of the most odious persons known to history instead of one of the most attractive.
  • George Bernard Shaw, in his prologue to Saint Joan; a Chronicle play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue

• We declare that you are fallen again into your former errors and under the sentence of excommunication which you originally incurred we decree that you are a relapsed heretic; and by this sentence which we deliver in writing and pronounce from this tribunal, we denounce you as a rotten member, which, so that you shall not infect the other members of Christ, must be cast out of the unity of the Church, cut off from her body, and given over to the secular power: we cast you off, separate and abandon you, praying this same secular power on this side of death and the mutilation of your limbs, to moderate its judgment towards you, and if true signs of repentance appear in you to permit the sacrament of penance to be administered to you.
  • A piece of the final sentence pronounced to Joan in public after her trial