The Time when a woman was Pope?

[Webcat Profile]

With the Pope about to retire to the seaside and talk of his successor filling the wonderful WWW, I looked up this story about some strange times when the Pope was a woman who gave birth on her way to St.Peter's!

The 'Urban legend' or hidden Conspiracy of the only female Pope: POPE JOAN!!!!

Pope Joan was a legendary female Pope who allegedly reigned for a few years some time during the Middle Ages. The story first appeared in 13th-century chronicles, [1] and was subsequently spread and embellished throughout Europe. It was widely believed for centuries, though modern religious scholars consider it fictitious, perhaps deriving from historicized folklore regarding Roman monuments or from anti-papal satire.

The first mention of the female pope appears in the chronicle of Jean de Mailly, but the most popular and influential version was that interpolated into Martin of Troppau's Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum, later in the 13th century. Most versions of her story describe her as a talented and learned woman who disguises herself as a man, often at the behest of a lover. In the most common accounts, due to her abilities, she rises through the church hierarchy, eventually being elected pope. However, while riding on horseback she gives birth, thus exposing her gender. In most versions, she dies shortly after, either being killed by an angry mob or from natural causes. Her memory is then shunned by her successors.

"Pope Joan."

L'Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops' Conference, last week dismissed the movie as "a hoax" and a film of "extremely limited vision".

But proponents of the story point out that papal records are almost non-existent in the 10th and 11th centuries and that even male popes are barely documented.

They point to one particularly extraordinary artefact as evidence that she existed – a wooden chair with a hole in the seat which, it is claimed, was used for 600 years to establish the gender of would-be popes in the wake of the Pope Joan scandal.

Papal candidates were supposedly made to sit on the 'sella stercoraria', which is today owned by the Vatican Museums, while a deacon prodded their genitalia from underneath to make sure of their manhood.

"Joan's absence from contemporary church records is only to be expected. The Roman clergymen of the day, appalled by the great deception visited upon them, would have gone to great lengths to bury all written reports of the embarrassing episode," argues the American writer Donna Woolfolk Cross, on whose novel, 'Pope Joan', the film is based.

"The Dark Ages really were the dark ages," said Peter Stanford, a former editor of the Catholic Herald and the author of 'The She-Pope: a quest for the truth behind the mystery of Pope Joan'.

"There is absolutely no certainty about who the popes of the ninth century were. We have to rely instead on medieval chronicles, written hundreds of years later.

"It's perfectly feasible that Joan existed. A monk's cowl is baggy and well suited to covering up a woman's body. We know that some women bound their breasts and cut their hair to pass themselves off as men." He dismisses the Catholic line that the story of Pope Joan was the product of Protestant black propaganda.

"That is categorically not true. There are plenty of pre-Reformation Catholic texts which mention Pope Joan. They were written by bishops, archbishops – even a secretary to a pope. "They all accept that she existed. The Catholic Church was embarrassed by the story and just erased it from the records, sometimes very crudely." Official histories of the popes make no mention of Pope Joan and many historians dismiss the story as a fable.

The truth about her may never be known, but the story continues to fascinate modern audiences.

The film reached the top 10 of most popular movies in Italian cinemas last week, just behind Hollywood blockbusters such as Robin Hood and Sex and the City 2.

"Pope Joan gives birth!"

I really liked the bit where the New Pope would have to sit on a special chair and a Deacon prod's his 'wedding tackle' to make sure he's male!

There is of course, a film (German made, I believe) about this amazing 'non-incident'.

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Urban Legend or Papal Conspiracy?

Some Sources and further reading here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458455/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan_%28novel%29
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/7841690/Pope-Joan-film-sparks-Roman-Catholic-Church-row.html

[Spock Profile]

Well as long as she can wear a sexy French maid outfit with that ass hangin out the back while whippin' up a pan of biscuits in the kitchen, then I'd say no prob what she does to earn a little spending money.

Oh, you meant there already was one.

[Constabul Profile]

If the Vatican was in a kitchen, then this might be true...






jk

[Cosmine Profile]

Yeah! The good old times when popes were elected this way...

[WillEase666 Profile]

Aaaaand, it's bullshit.

The Reality:

Unfortunately, Pope Joan's story has some birth-canal-sized plot holes. Like the year of Pope Joan's coronation, 855. That can't be right, because Leo IV was immediately replaced by Benedict III in 855. Unless she was actually John VIII, who reigned from 872 until 882, except that fully penised guy had his own backstory and sad demise. There really are no empty spots in the church's history where a theoretical mystery pope could have stepped in.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_20258_6- ... z2KhMeV183

[Cosmine Profile]

...

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries this popess was already counted as an historical personage, whose existence no one doubted. She had her place among the carved busts which stood in Siena cathedral. Under Clement VIII, and at his request, she was transformed into Pope Zacharias. The heretic Hus, in the defense of his false doctrine before the Council of Constance, referred to the popess, and no one offered to question the fact of her existence. She is not found in the "Liber Pontificalis" nor among the papal portraits in St. Paul's Outside the Walls, at Rome.

...
http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Popess_Joan


Do we really know better now than then...

[Perronick Profile]

The Church has deleted bigger things from the pages of History.

Slightly on-topic, there's also Catalina de Erauso, the Nun-lieutenant. She wrote her own auto-biography: "Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World "

One of the earliest known autobiographies by a woman, this is the extraordinary tale of Catalina de Erauso, who in 1599 escaped from a Basque convent dressed as a man and went on to live one of the most wildly fantastic lives of any woman in history. A soldier in the Spanish army, she traveled to Peru and Chile, became a gambler, and even mistakenly killed her own brother in a duel. During her lifetime she emerged as the adored folkloric hero of the Spanish-speaking world. This delightful translation of Catalina's own work introduces a new audience to her audacious escapades.

[Webcat Profile]

The Church has deleted bigger things from the pages of History.

Slightly on-topic, there's also , the Nun-lieutenant. She wrote her own auto-biography: "Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World "

One of the earliest known autobiographies by a woman, this is the extraordinary tale of Catalina de Erauso, who in 1599 escaped from a Basque convent dressed as a man and went on to live one of the most wildly fantastic lives of any woman in history. A soldier in the Spanish army, she traveled to Peru and Chile, became a gambler, and even mistakenly killed her own brother in a duel. During her lifetime she emerged as the adored folkloric hero of the Spanish-speaking world. This delightful translation of Catalina's own work introduces a new audience to her audacious escapades.

Now I loved this, she's probably worth her own thread!


"Herself/Himself."

Her story puts Pope Joan's in the shade!

Thanks Perronick.