Feast Day of St. Joan of Arc to be an annual celebration in city

Pondicherry celebrates St. Joan of Arc Feast Day with military tribute, litanies, and song service at Notre Dame des Anges.

The city, on Thursday, hosted its maiden celebration of St. Joan of Arc Feast Day in homage to France’s patroness-saint Jean d’Arc, with a military tribute, litanies, and song service under the auspices of the Notre Dame des Anges (Our Lady of Angels) Church on Rue Dumas.

While the city’s Catholic tradition features ‘Feast Day’ events for several popular saints coinciding with their death anniversary, or entry into heaven as believed by the faithful, the Our Lady of Angels, as the only place of worship following French praxis, had recently decided to organise its first feast day of the French icon.

“The Feast Day celebration of the patroness-saint’s memory will be an annual event in our liturgical calendar”, said Fr. John Kennedy, parish priest at the Church of Our Lady of Our Angels.

The Feast Day commemorates the anniversary of the day in 1431 when Joan of Arc who led the French army in the battle at Orléans in 1429 to liberate her people from the English.

Joan of Arc was later captured by the Duke of Burgundy’s men, confined, put on a sham trial on charges of heresy and witchcraft, and eventually burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. It was not until 1450, that the guilty verdict was overturned by a Rehabilitation Trial ordered by Charles VII. In 1909, she was beatified in the famous Notre Dame cathedral in Paris by Pope Pius X, and in 1920, she was canonised by Pope Benedict XV.

The remembrance ceremonies for an iconic figure, revered for valour, supreme sacrifice and spirituality, were arranged at the renovated Le jardin de Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc garden), which has as its centre-piece a marble sculpture of the celebrated icon.

As the only parish in India where masses are rendered in French, English and Tamil, the proceedings were conducted in all three languages.