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The Combined Hearts

Sainte Jeanne d'Arc

St. Joan of Arc

1412 – 1431. The Maid of Orléans · Patroness of France. Feast: May 30.

Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII, painting by Ingres, 1854
Ingres, Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII, 1854. Louvre.

This shrine is not another life of Joan. It is Joan as Thérèse received her: a sister, a patron still waiting for the altar, a timid virgin given a warrior's soul, and at the end a prisoner more beautiful than at any coronation.

Her life, prayers, and chapel live at a companion shrine: Saint Joan of Arc. What follows here is the Maid as the Little Flower knew her.

Joan of Arc was born at Domrémy around 1412. She heard St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret. She lifted the siege of Orléans in 1429 and stood in Reims as Charles VII was crowned. Captured, sold, tried, and burned at Rouen on 30 May 1431, she was nineteen. The Church nullified the trial in 1456. She was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920 — twenty-three years after Thérèse died praying for that canonization.

Thérèse's Joan is not first a general. "It is not Joan's victories we wish to celebrate this day. My God, we know her true glories are her virtues, her love." The girl who tended weak lambs is the same girl who commands an army. The monasteries belong to her because virgins are her sisters. The object of their prayer is the same: that God reign in every heart.

A heart of fire, a warrior's soul: You gave them to the timid virgin whom You wished to crown with laurels.

Canticle to Obtain the Canonization of Joan of Arc, 1894
Joan of Arc at the siege of Orléans, holding her banner before the city walls
Joan at Orléans — the public mission Thérèse translated into Carmel.
Statue of Saint Joan of Arc in Notre-Dame de Paris
Joan in Notre-Dame de Paris. Armor at rest, the banner still in hand.

What Thérèse wanted from her

Not a second Orléans of artillery. A second conversion of France. Protection of the powerless. Fire of apostle and martyr for the hidden virgins of Carmel. In the last poem, written from Thérèse's own dungeon of unbelief, Joan's prison outshines Reims. That is the Joan of the Combined Hearts: the one who is most herself when everything visible has been taken.

Open the Joan shrineRead the poems she wrote for Joan