1920 · Vatican City

Canonization of Joan of Arc

In 1920, the Church declared a saint the teenage girl it had burned at the stake five centuries earlier, one of the most extraordinary reversals in Catholic history.

Joan of Arc was a seventeen-year-old peasant who claimed that saints spoke to her and told her to lead the French army against the English. Incredibly, she was given command and won. She lifted the siege of Orleans in 1429, turned the tide of the Hundred Years' War, and saw the Dauphin crowned king at Reims. Within two years, she was captured by Burgundian forces, sold to the English, and put on trial for heresy by a church court led by Bishop Pierre Cauchon, who was firmly in the English camp. The trial was a sham. Cauchon manipulated the proceedings, denied Joan proper legal counsel, and used her illiteracy against her. She was convicted and burned alive in Rouen on May 30, 1431. She was nineteen years old. Twenty-five years later, a retrial ordered by Pope Callixtus III overturned the conviction and declared her innocent. But it took until 1909 for her to be beatified and until 1920 for Pope Benedict XV to canonize her. The five-century gap between her execution by a Catholic court and her canonization by the Catholic Church is one of the most uncomfortable facts in Church history. It is also one of the most honest: the Church admitted it got it wrong, catastrophically, and corrected the record.

Why it matters

Corrected one of the Church's worst judicial injustices by canonizing the woman a Catholic court had burned as a heretic, demonstrating the Church's capacity for self-correction across centuries.