Saint Joan of Valois

Saint Joan of Valois, also called Joan of France, was the daughter of King Louis XI of France and for a few months queen as the wife of Louis XII. After her marriage was declared null she governed the Duchy of Berry and founded the Order of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Annonciades. The Church commemorates her on February 4.

She was born on April 23, 1464, at Nogent-le-Roi. Her mother was Charlotte of Savoy. Her father, who had been waiting for a son, showed his daughter no affection, all the more because she was frail and deformed. When she was less than a month old, he betrothed her to her cousin, Duke Louis of Orléans. At the age of five she was sent to be brought up in the castle of Lignières in Berry. There, far from the court, in the care of a devout governess, she came to love prayer and the Mother of God.

In 1476, at the age of twelve, she was married by her father’s will at Montrichard to the fourteen-year-old Louis. Her husband did not hide his aversion and kept away from her. Joan nevertheless held the marriage to be valid, bore the humiliations patiently, and forgave them. When the duke was imprisoned after rebelling against the king, she visited him and begged her brother, Charles VIII, to release him.

In 1498 Charles VIII died without a male heir, and the Duke of Orléans came to the throne as Louis XII. He did not admit Joan to his coronation and brought a case before an ecclesiastical tribunal to have the marriage declared null. Joan defended its validity, but on December 17, 1498, the tribunal ruled that it was null. Pius XII said of her that she serenely bade farewell to the earthly kingdom in order to strive all the more zealously for the Kingdom of God.

She was given the Duchy of Berry to govern and in 1499 settled in its capital, Bourges. She ruled justly and prudently, and the people called her the good duchess. When plague broke out in the city, she herself visited the sick and dressed their sores.

In Bourges she fulfilled a desire she had long carried within her. Together with her confessor, the Franciscan Gabriel Maria, whom Pope Leo XIV enrolled among the blessed in 2026, she founded an order of nuns devoted to prayer and to imitating the virtues of Mary. Pope Alexander VI approved its rule, and in 1502 the first sisters received the habit. Joan went on governing the duchy, but she wore the habit beneath her ducal robes, and on the Solemnity of Pentecost in 1504 she made the vows of her order in the hands of her confessor.

She died in Bourges on February 4, 1505, and was buried in the chapel of the monastery. In 1562, during the Wars of Religion, Huguenots took her body from the tomb and burned it. In 1742 Benedict XIV confirmed the veneration long paid to her and enrolled her among the blessed. Pius XII, who before his election as pope had himself been the relator of her cause, canonized her on May 28, 1950, the Solemnity of Pentecost. The Annonciades exist to this day, and since 2009 they have also been present in Poland, at the shrine of Licheń.