Saint Joan of Arc (Jeanne la Pucelle): Difference between revisions
→Why? Why Joan? Why her suffering?
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It confounds the honest reader the betrayals, denials, and injustices that Joan suffered. | It confounds the honest reader the betrayals, denials, and injustices that Joan suffered. | ||
I have a theory. | I have a theory. I developed this theory before I knew much about Saint Joan, the Maiden of Orleans. | ||
Mark Twain's account | Most people would look upon the Hundred Years War as, and the language of the day, a war between the English and the French. Indeed, the French called their enemy the English, and the English called their enemy the French. They were all French. The war was between the French, and was thus a civil war, which makes it especially brutal. | ||
In my theory, had the "English," whose rulers spoke French at home, won and reclaimed France on top of England, then both England and France, a hundred years later, would have under Henry VIII left the Catholic church. Sure, lots of conditions may have prevented that, but we can draw a straight line from the Church of England to the Church of England/France. This would not have pleased God. | |||
Whatever the value of my theory that God meant to keep France Catholic, I am intrigued by this excerpt from Mark Twain's account of the trial of St. Joan: <blockquote>And now, by order of Cauchon, an ecclesiastic named Nicholas Midi preached a sermon, wherein he explained that when a branch of the vine — which is the Church — becomes diseased and corrupt, it must be cut away or it will corrupt and destroy the whole vine.</blockquote>Whereas the English partisian, Father Midi, saw the destruction of Joan the pruning of a dead branch of the Church (the vine, as Twain correctly explains), by cutting her off, he and Bishop Cauchon were instead pruning themselves from the vine of France. The dead vine cut off was England! | |||
> Henry VIII | > Henry VIII | ||