"GREAT IS TRUTH: IT PREVAILS"

*JOHN T. NOONAN, Jr.*
Milo Rees Robbins Professor of Law and Legal Ethics
University of California Law School, Berkeley

I encountered the saying I employ as a title in the Statute of 
Religious Liberty, America's first legislative commitment to complete 
religious freedom, drafted by Jefferson in 1779 and enacted by the 
Virginia Assembly in 1785.  In its Jeffersonian form, where it operates 
as the statute's final and conclusive argument for religious freedom, 
it reads, "Truth is great, and it will prevail, if left to itself."1  
Was this a conventional bromide or a piece of 18th-century 
Enlightenment optimism or over-optimism, with a wry American caveat "if 
left to itself" added?  I wondered.  Tracing the English expression 
back to its roots, I discovered they lay in revelation.  "Magna est 
veritas, et praevalet" reads Esdras 4.4 in the Vulgate.  "Truth is 
great, and it does prevail."  The statement is less bromidic, more 
challenging than any Enlightenment expression could be.  In what sense 
does truth prevail?  With that question in mind I shall present to you 
three episodes in the history of the Catholic Church.  Let me begin 
with testimony:
     
Joan in her last moments had wonderful contrition and broke out into 
words so Catholic and devout that they moved everyone in that great 
throng, including the English cardinal and many other Englishmen.  She 
asked me to stay with her at the end and humbly begged me to go to a 
nearby church and bring her a cross, and I held it erect before her 
eyes, until her passing, so she could always and ceaselessly see the 
cross.  In the middle of the flames, she never stopped confessing and 
crying out in a loud voice the holy name of Jesus Christ, or imploring, 
most devoutly, the help of the saints.  As she expired and bowed her 
head, she professed the name of Jesus, a sign of the faith with which 
she was animated, just as we read of St. Ignatius and many holy 
martyrs.
The executioner came to me and my associate, Brother Martin Lavenu, 
immediately after the burning, impelled by a wonderful and terrible 
penitence. It was as if he despaired of receiving pardon from God after 
what he had done to her, who, as he said, was such a holy woman.  He 
also affirmed that although he had several times put the wood and coals 
upon her entrails and heart, he could in no way consume her heart or 
reduce it to cinders; and at this he was amazed, as if it were an 
evident miracle.2

The witness is Ysambart de la Pierre, who was with Joan of Arc in her 
last moments in Rouen on Many 30, 1432.3  Before he helped her at her 
death he had been an official signatory of two statements: one, that 
Joan was a lying, devil-inspired heretic; the other, that she was not 
only a heretic but a relapsed heretic.  What was the relapse?  Her 
English jailers would not give her her clothes.  Hence she was 
compelled to resume the men's clothes she had been wearing and had 
promised to renounce.  For this offense she was burned.
The judgment of conviction was pronounced by the experienced bishop of 
the diocese, Pierre Cauchon, assisted by theologians from Paris, the 
leading theological faculty in the world.  Joan's trial had been made 
possible in principle by the defense--based on Scripture--of the 
practice of governmental repression of heresy elaborated by St. 
Augustine in his treatise The Correction of Donatists; by the defense 
of the practice of killing relapsed heretics elaborated by St. Thomas 
Aquinas in the second part of the second part of the Summa theologiae; 
and by the odious, paper-thin, legal fiction devised by canonists that 
the Church, when pronouncing the heretic relapsed, did not condemn the 
heretic but merely released him or her to the justice of the secular 
power.  The verdict against Joan was quashed by Pope Calixtus III a 
quarter of a century after her death; she was canonized by Pope 
Benedict XV five centuries later.  The truth did prevail in time.  But 

in what sense did it prevail that May day in Rouen when Joan told 
Bishop Pierre Cauchon--"Peter Pig" as his name may be 
anglicized--"Bishop, I die by you"?
The second episode is also French, much later in history.  In 1830, in 
the wake of the July revolution, Felicité de Lamennais and his 
collaborators began the publication of a newspaper, L'Avenir--"The 
Future."  Lamennais, a 48-year-old priest, was the leading apologist 
for the Church in France, the author of a formidible work attacking 
religious indifferentism or the theological view that all religions are 
equally good, and the champion of the papacy in a country where 
Gallicanism has at times veered toward Anglicanism.  His collaborators 
were Charles de Montalembert and Henri-Dominique Lacordaire.  The 
slogan of L'Avenir was "God and Liberty."  In impassioned editorials, 
Lamennais argued for the separation of Church and State; asserted that 
for Catholicism support by the state was servitude and death; cited the 
examples of Belgium, Ireland, and Poland to show the great value that 
religious liberty already had for various Catholic peoples; and 
declared, "It is religion which alone has freed human beings.  What 
then more natural than the alliance of religion and liberty?"4  The 
future of religion he saw lay in replacing the alliance of Throne and 
Altar with this new alliance.
Today, no doubt, Lamennais' views seem unsurprising.  In