NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Mark Twain—born Samuel Clemens—loved little about Christianity. He loved even less about the Catholic Church. He didn’t like her priests. He didn’t like her sacraments. And he didn’t like her Scriptures.
“It’s ain’t those parts of the Bible that I don’t understand that bother me; it is the parts that I do understand,” he once quipped. Yet, for all that Mark Twain disliked about the Church, there was one Catholic he loved: Saint Joan of Arc.
As Twain tells it, he first came across an account of the -warrior-maiden’s martyrdom as a teenager. He then spent the next three decades dreaming of writing a book about her and another decade researching her life. That research included traveling to France’s National Archives to read through the transcripts of the trial that ended in her martyrdom on May 30, 1431.
When Twain’s research was complete, the writing began. Two years later, in 1895, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc went to press. Then, as now, the book surprised Twain’s readers. Absent from it were the sharp wit and broad humor that characterized most of his work. In their place was some fairly serious scholarship as well as a reverence for the saint bordering on devotion.
“Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it,” he wrote, adding, “She is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”
Although few critics found much to praise in the book, Twain -couldn’t have been happier.
“I like Joan of Arc best of all my books,” he said in his last years, “and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.”
The Catholic Church celebrates the feast day of Twain’s favorite saint on May 30. Hopefully, through her intercession, Twain now does the same.
