They burned me in 1431. They declared me a saint in 1920.
I want to talk about the gap. Not because the history matters – it does, but it is not my point. Because the pattern matters, and the pattern is alive in every institution that has ever condemned a person for doing the right thing and then, decades later, celebrated them for it.
The Pattern
The pattern is this: a person acts on conviction. The institution that benefits from their action also feels threatened by it, because the action exposes the institution’s failure to act. The institution condemns the person. The person is destroyed. Time passes. The institution, no longer threatened, recognizes the value of what the person did. The person is rehabilitated, celebrated, canonized.
The institution gets to be both the executioner and the eulogist. It gets the benefit of the action without the discomfort of having to tolerate the actor while they were alive.
This is not an anomaly. It is how institutions manage the people who challenge them. Destroy them when they are present. Celebrate them when they are safely dead.
What the Gap Means
The gap between condemnation and celebration is not a correction of error. It is not the institution saying “we were wrong.” It is the institution saying “the threat has passed, and now we can absorb the person’s legacy into our own narrative.”
The rehabilitation serves the institution, not the person. By canonizing me, the Church did not undo my execution. It claimed ownership of my legacy. The girl they burned became their saint. The act of defiance that threatened them became, in the official narrative, an act of obedience that served them.
This rewriting is not unique to my case. Every institution that belatedly celebrates its dissidents is performing the same operation: converting the dissident’s challenge into the institution’s triumph.
To the Living Dissidents
If you are someone who is currently being condemned by the institution you challenged – fired for whistleblowing, expelled for protesting, ostracized for speaking the truth – I want you to know two things.
First: the institution may eventually acknowledge that you were right. This is cold comfort, and it should be. The acknowledgment, when it comes, will serve the institution, not you. It will arrive too late to undo the damage. It will be offered in language that minimizes the institution’s role in your suffering. And it will be presented as the institution’s own enlightenment rather than as a correction forced by your sacrifice.
Second: the verdict of the institution does not determine the value of your action. The action stands on its own. It was right when you took it. It was right when they condemned you for it. It will be right when they eventually celebrate it. The institutional verdict is noise. The action is the signal.
What I Would Have You Remember
They burned me. The verdict was unanimous. The authorities who ordered it were sincere in their belief that they were protecting the institution from a dangerous dissident. The crowd that watched was convinced that justice was being served.
Twenty-five years later, a new inquiry found the verdict to be fraudulent. Five hundred years later, I was made a saint.
The fire was real. The verdicts – all of them, the condemnation and the canonization – were institutional performances. The fire was what happened to my body. The verdicts were what happened to my story. These are different things.
Do not wait for the verdict. Do not act in anticipation of being celebrated, and do not refrain from acting in fear of being condemned. The institution’s judgment is temporary. The action is permanent.
Act. Let the verdicts sort themselves out. They always do. Eventually.