St. Joan of Arc, ora pro nobis!

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St Joan of Arc Chapel - Marquette University 

For more than five centuries — no one knows how much longer — and before Columbus was even born — the special little Gothic oratory known as the Chapelle de St. Martin de Sayssuel was important to the noble families of the countryside and to the little French village of Chasse in the Département de L’Isère, Arrondissement de Vienne, twelve miles south of Lyon, six miles north of Vienne, in the Rhone River Valley. There a rambling cluster of buildings grew up around the Chapel, forming the ecclesiastical center of the village and of the surrounding château.

Like most European medieval structure, it was not built in a single generation but showed the accretions of various periods and architectural styles, a living record in miniature of the history of the little village and of France.

After the French Revolution, when the archives of many of the French churches were lost or destroyed, it gradually fell into ruin and wind-swept dilapidation.

- John Pick, Marquette University

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