MR SHAW ON JOAN OF ARC

Hokitika Guardian, 23 July 1931, Page 8

MR SHAW ON JOAN OF ARC

A WIRELESS CHAT. EXTRAORDINARY YOUNG WOMAN. ' LONDON, May 131. .Mr Bernard Shaw went to Me jl,oiidon stiuuo oi tne 8.1i.C. last night to give a talk aoout toe. Joan di a,c, on the five hundredth anniversary of her martyrdom. “There is no one, 1 am sure, you would rather hear than the author ot the play” said the announcer, introducing the lecturer to a vast unseen audience. .Mr Shaw himself began by saving: “How do you do, ladies and gentlemen and telling them he had promised to give them “a chat about that very extraordinary young woman who was burned five hundred years ago.” He really meant “a chat,” he said explaining that lie had ‘not got a manuscript mostly carved out of the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’, but was sit ting there quite comfortably, intending to say anything about St. Joan that came into his head.”

NO GREAT CONSEQUENCE

The first tiling he asked his listeners to get <ut of their 1 eatls was the fact that she was burned, for that was of no very great consequence now. She was only one of a great number ot people who were burned. The bounder of Christianity himself was excised; but a belief in Chritianity did not mean getting very excited in a sensational way about the very horrible way in which its Founder was executed. Sixty thousand persons were crucified not long before because they revolted against their conditions of slavery. They suffered in the same way : >s Jesus and therefore they must not think of people like Joan and Jesus Christ as ericified ones. What they had to consider was the manner of people their executioners were, and why fivte thousand years afterwards we should still be talking about them. The really significant thing to-day is that Joan was burned by a tribunal which represented Christianity in the world. She was burned by a Catholic tribunal, one which at the time really represented the whole Chritian feeling of the world, and they gave her a very | long, a very careful, and a very conscientious trial; and found her guilty ; on all the counts of the , indictment : made against her.

Dealing with some of these counts Mr Shaw showed how Joan could not understand how men of the Church, ns she spoke of them, or how anyone could propose to come between her and God. In that way she was guilty of the most shocking heresy.

WITCHCRAFT'

She was guilty, too, of witchcraft. She no doubt honestly believed in her “voices” coming trim saints. The main sin of witchcraft in those days was having intercourses with spirits and the Church told her they were evil spirits tempting her to her damnation. As in the play. Mr Shaw showed too, that he judges did not try to trap her into admissions—they did their best to make her withdraw her statements. On the subject of Joan’s recentation Mr Shaw recalled that when she learned she was not going to be set free but to be condemned to perpptual imprisonment, she withdrew it, and by her own deliberate choice she was burned instead of being perpetually imprisoned. That was something for us to think about when we considered how we are always cpndmning people after crimes to this very punishment of imprisonment for in that we are according to the judgment of this woman, using a crueller punishment than that of her own choice between the two.