May 30 is the feast of St. Joan of Arc (c. 1412-1431), the farmer's daughter from Domrémy who heard the voices of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, and who lifted the siege of Orléans on May 8, 1429. She was captured at Compiègne by the Burgundians, sold to the English, tried for heresy at Rouen, and burned in the Place du Vieux-Marché on May 30, 1431, at about nineteen. Her body was burned three times over and the ashes thrown into the Seine, so she left no relics and has no tomb.
The trial that condemned her was reopened by Pope Callixtus III, and in 1456 the verdict was annulled. Joan was beatified in 1909, canonized by Benedict XV on May 16, 1920, and named a secondary patron of France by Pius XI on March 2, 1922, with the Blessed Virgin Mary as principal patroness.
Her shrine is at Domrémy-la-Pucelle, the village of her birth in the Vosges. The church of Saint-Rémy there keeps the font she was baptized in, and on the hillside above the village, where she said she first heard the voices, the Basilica of Saint Joan of Arc — the Bois-Chenu — was begun in 1881 and raised to a minor basilica in 1938. Rouen holds the other end of her life. A cross in the Place du Vieux-Marché marks where she died, and the Church of Saint Joan of Arc was consecrated across the same square in 1979; the diocese keeps her feast over the weekend nearest May 30, with the panegyric preached in the cathedral.
Two cities mark her on their own dates. Orléans keeps the lifting of the siege every May 8 in a joint civic, military, and religious observance, one of the oldest kept anywhere in France. At Reims, Charles VII was crowned on July 17, 1429, with Joan near the altar holding her banner — the cathedral where French kings from Louis VIII to Charles X received their crowns.
