Joan of Arc showed that radical holiness and faithfulness is a call of every person by virtue of the sacrament of baptism, not the sacrament of Holy Orders. Her witness is also a prime example that the path to holiness contains elements we may not suspect. A ticket to heaven is not part of the “swag” given to a priest at his ordination. Priests and bishops – even the Pope himself – only keep their faith and achieve sanctity by upholding their pursuit of the Truth through prayer and faithfulness to Christ. You can read the book for details.īelow you’ll find four key lessons we can glean from Twain’s account of the life lived by one of history’s greatest saints, Joan of Arc: 1) Lay people can (and should) live lives of heroic virtue Public Domain, Wikimedia CommonsĪlthough arguably more responsibility is placed upon the shoulders of the ordained, we laymen and laywomen have a call no different than that of our brothers and sisters in the religious life.
In a later essay on Joan of Arc, Twain called her “the Wonder of the Ages” and proudly declared that she was “easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”Īs you might imagine, Twain ensured that the book itself was exceedingly accurate, historically speaking, despite telling the story itself through the eyes of a fictional friend of Joan’s. Twain’s passion, mixed with the personality and artistic flourishes of the fictional narrator, make for a truly marvelous reading experience, and I’d recommend the book to anyone.
Many of Twain’s contemporaries knew the high esteem he had for St. First Edition cover of Twain’s “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc” / Public Domain, Wikipedia Few people today know that Mark Twain, one of the greatest American authors in history and hardly a man with healthy respect for organized religion, wrote a book on the great 14th-Century saint, Joan of Arc.Įven fewer, I imagine, realize that Twain regarded it as his best and most important work, devoting 12 years to researching the project and enduring six failed attempts at writing the book in order to produce his great masterpiece.
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