The Fire and the Verdict
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.