Feast Day of St. Joan of Arc to be an annual celebration in city

The city, on Thursday, hosted its maiden celebration of St. Joan of Arc Feast Day in homage to France’s patroness-saint Jean d’Arc, with a military tribute, litanies, and song service under the auspices of the Notre Dame des Anges Church on Rue Dumas. While the city’s Catholic tradition features ‘Feast Day’ events for several popular saints coinciding with their death anniversary, or entry into heaven as believed by the faithful, the Our Lady of Angels, as the only place of worship following French praxis, had recently decided to organise its first feast day of the French icon. The Feast Day commemorates the anniversary of the day in 1431 when Joan of Arc who led the French army in the battle at Orléans in 1429 to liberate her people from the English. Since a church first came up in 1707—the year following the death of François Martin, the first French Governor-General who developed the port city of erstwhile Pondicherry—the edifice was rebuilt under the rule of subsequent Governor-Generals Pierre Benoît Dumas and Joseph-François Dupleix.