May 16, 1920: Pope Benedict XV canonizes Joan of Arc.
At dawn on May 16, 1920, St. Peter’s Basilica was aglow with the slow, soft light of wax candles. Already a massive pilgrimage had gathered in Vatican City, around the basilica, to witness the canonization of Joan of Arc. The audience would swell to around 70,000; among the group of official attendees milled ambassadors to the Holy See bedecked in full diplomatic costume, French and Russian aristocrats, papal courtiers.
Nearly half a millennium after the nineteen year old Jeanne was put on trial, burned thrice at the stake, excommunicated, and declared a martyr, Pope Benedict XV stood at the head of this ceremony and attested to “the sanctity of the bravest maiden within the recollection of men and the most innocent,” and by papal decree “forever [erased] from memory the stain of her unjust condemnation.”
Twenty-five years after her condemnation, Joan had been quickly redeemed, her executioner excommunicated, and in the near and distant afterlife she was claimed as patron to French nationalists; Catholics of all nationalities; 19th century painters and poets of Romance; Latin American right-wingers and Mexican soldaderas; modern feminist progressives and Marine Le Pen; all of these alike.
She sustained an unmatched folk following, which only grew, with a particular Romantic gusto through the 1800s, until the formal process toward sainthood began at the turn of the century. Despite her popular appeal, the road was not entirely paved—her life and deeds were picked apart under the highest standards, a strange and difficult task given the opacity of the historical record, and of the nature of divine communion itself. She had attacked Paris on the Nativity of Mary and thereby desecrated a feast day; she lied, had broken oaths, attempted to escape imprisonment, and there were “doubts as to her chastity.” She was heroic, and admirable, even divinely so, certainly, but saintly?
Her advocates argued that tactical circumstances had driven her to attack Paris on that particular day, and also that her “voices” had not interceded to stop her - so God, clearly, had no qualms about disrupting a feast day. It was in this way that “spiritual lawyers” debated her merits and demerits, alternating between historical accounts, primary sources, and estimations of her character, and this single confounding variable of God’s will. One devil’s advocate argued that “God… allowed Joan to be taken because of the pride with which she was puffed up and because of the extravagant clothes she wore.” A defender argued that she “committed no sin” in donning “male garb,” since she believed she had done so on God’s command. Because she feared and even shunned death, she could not be considered a perfect martyr.
Her beatification and canonization, like her trial and burning, came finally in a detonation of political buildup. The latter was pushed through, at the end of World War I, partly as an “attempt to recapture the larger public imagination” as the Church faced down a “tide of socialist, anticlerical thought.” In 1891 Pope Leo XIII had issued an encyclical that attempted to define the ancient institution’s place in a sea of modernism, capitalism, science, socialism, war. Thirty years later the Church was still thinking. Joan was refashioned once again, for another purpose.
Another party sat before the Pope, in May 1920, as he delivered his pronouncement. It was a motley group, comprising around “140 descendants of the family of Joan of Arc,” placed in a prominent tribune. They belonged “to all ranks of life” and had travelled “from all parts of France.” Between her execution and canonization they had scattered across France and regathered in St. Peter’s Basilica, five hundred years later. The elusive historical-mythical Joan had herself been scattered and revived and transformed over centuries and was transforming still then before their eyes. She was regarded in her own time as both heretical and saintly. John of Lancaster reported that his soldiers faltered and deserted English forces in droves out of their “unholy fear… of a disciple and limb of Satan, called the Maid, who employed spells and sorcery.”
Another contemporary wrote that the young Jeanne - not the saint nor the witch nor even the commander but the girl - “weeps easily and abundantly. Her face radiates joy.”