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May 30
Joan of Arc, Jerome of Prague, and the Memorial Day Massacre.
David Barnhart
May 30, 2025
Mountain stream, 2025. Own photo.
May 30th is the feast day of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc), martyred on this day in 1431. Joan was a young woman who claimed to hear the voice of God and led a movement to restore France to the French people. When she was captured by the English and tried for heresy and for cross-dressing, she astounded listeners with her brilliant answers. At one point, she was asked a trick question: Do you know you are in God’s grace? If she answered yes, she would have been called a heretic for assuming knowledge of her salvation, and if she said no she would have been incriminating herself. So she answered, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.”
Joan fought with Hussites, so it is ironic that today also marks the martyrdom, in 1416, of Jerome of Prague, a follower of Jan Hus in challenging Christians to follow the words of Jesus over the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
Today in 1937, Chicago police shot and killed ten steel labor union protesters and injured fifty more in the “Memorial Day Massacre.” This event, one of many instances of government violence against organized labor, has been intentionally and effectively memory-holed. In today’s world of massive billionaire wealth, AI labor-stealing, the dismantling of labor protections, and manufactured poverty, it’s important to remember that every right we have has been bought with blood.
Today in 2008, the Convention on Cluster Munitions was adopted to ban the use of indiscriminate “bomblets.” While a majority of the world’s nations have signed on, the United States and Russia have not.
Reflection:
Before his death, Jerome of Prague said,
“You condemn me, though innocent. But after my death I will leave a sting in you. I call on you to answer me before Almighty God within a hundred years.”
Joan similarly said to Bishop Pierre Cauchon,
“You say that you are my judge. I do not know if you are! But I tell you that you must take good care not to judge me wrongly, because you will put yourself in great danger. I warn you, so that if God punishes you for it, I would have done my duty by telling you!”
Mark Twain said that of his books, his own favorite was his biography of Joan of Arc. The author famous for his wit and cynicism wrote this about her:
“When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities.”
One of my purposes in writing these devotionals is to find inspiration from the past for dealing with the world’s present desperation, our new “age when crime is the common business of lords and princes.”
Prayer: God, helps us to fear no evil, even as we walk through the valley of deep shadow. Amen.