Église Saint-Remy, Domrémy-la-Pucelle

Why Go

The Parish Before the Mission

Everything public about Joan of Arc began somewhere private and sacramental, and this is where. She was made a Christian in this parish, and the sacramental life she kept up under interrogation at Rouen, the confession and Communion she asked for and was refused, started in this room. Coming here first puts the rest of her story in the right order. She was not a soldier who happened to be devout. She was a baptized village Catholic who was sent.

Baptized at Domrémy

Joan was baptized in this parish as an infant, around 1412. The exact day is not recorded, and the godparents named later in the rehabilitation testimony are the closest thing to a contemporary account of the event. She grew up going to this church. Witnesses at the 1456 proceedings remembered a girl who went to confession often, who knelt when the bells rang, and whom some of the other children teased for praying too much. She named Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret when she was asked at Rouen who spoke to her, and those three were figures a Lorraine village would have known from its own altars and images rather than from a theologian's library. The dedication of the church is to Saint Remigius, the bishop who baptized Clovis at Reims. Joan would return to Reims seventeen years later for a coronation.

A small stone church with a heavy western tower and a nave that has been rebuilt and reordered more than once. Work of several centuries sits side by side, and the interior arrangement is not the one Joan knew. The building is nonetheless continuous with the church of her baptism rather than a later replacement on the site.