An initiative of prayer and religious formation under the aegis of St. Joan of Arc has just been initiated in France, with the aim of making it recover its original vocation as the “Eldest Daughter of the Church” and leading the rest of the world in a renewal of faith.

In a country that has been secularized to the extreme and is losing its deep historic identity, where anti-Christian acts are multiplying at the same rate as laws contrary to protection of life, nothing less than the intercession of the Maid of Orleans was needed to inspire a renewal of the Catholic faith in her native country. It is this conviction that inspired Catholic philosopher Thibaud Collin the idea of a novena of prayer that will not only be spread over nine days as is customary, but also over the nine years that will lead to the celebration of the sixth centenary of the famous saint’s death, in 2031. 

Open to the whole community of believers throughout the world, the novena consists of a daily prayer intended to help each faithful put one’s heart and soul in tune with the virtues of St. Joan of Arc and thus meet the new challenges of our time. 

A monthly newsletter will also be sent to all the website’s subscribers with inspiring texts, meditation proposals, and concrete spiritual challenges to accompany the prayers, along with pilgrimage offers, fasting programs, online conferences.

“Jeanne 2031 is an invitation to fervent prayer and ordinary holiness in the perspective of assuming the human world in which God has placed us. Jeanne is a sure guide for all the faithful who wish to respond generously to the universal call to holiness inscribed in their baptism,” the official page of the prayer initiative states. 

Each year will be devoted to the practice and development of one of the specific virtues or strengths that characterized St. Joan of Arc. 2023, which will mark the first official year of the novena, is a calling to the obedience to God’s will. It will be followed, in 2024, by the year of prudence, then by that of courage, hope, patriotism, charity, practice of sacraments, and purity. The final year of the novena, in 2031, will be dedicated to patience. 

In an interview with Catholic magazine Famille Chrétienne, Thibaud Collin told that the idea of a nine-year novena came to him last summer while reading Joan of Arc: Her Story by prominent French historian Régine Pernoud, to his 9-year-old daughter. “It reminded me that Joan died in 1431. I thought of the novena, in years, that the Polish bishops, under the direction of Cardinal Wyszynski, had launched in 1958 to prepare the millennium of Poland, in 1966,” he said. “We saw the fruits of this in the years that followed: Solidarność, Saint John Paul II, etc. […] The dissidents of the East, Wojtyla, Havel, Solzhenitsyn, to name but a few, had a very marked spiritual dimension, and it is thanks to this that they were so fruitful,” he added, expressing his conviction that prayer and fasting can have a very concrete impact on societies. 

In light of the fact that our era is faced with challenges that are no less than those of France and the Church of the 15th century, Collin and the dozen of faithful behind the project thought that nine years wouldn’t be too much to help the participants become “knights in the footsteps of Joan by deploying her virtues and subtlety to restore the divine and natural order in a chaotic world.”

“Her faith, her creativity, her freedom, her magnanimity are not done shining in the eyes of those who turn to her and awaken in their hearts the desire for great things,” the promoters of the prayer initiative wrote on their website. 

 

Daily Prayer to St. Joan of Arc: 

 

Saint Joan

Like you, we want to be faithful to the promises of our baptism;

Guide us.

We want to discern God’s will in order to fulfill it;

Enlighten us.

We desire to follow the standard of Christ to extend his reign over our lives, our homeland and the Church;

Go ahead of us.

We beseech you for the salvation of our country and our souls;

Pray for us.