Hi
For close to 800 years every pope has gone through a gender check on receiving the so-call keys of Peter. A test which new popes have to get their scrotum and genitalia checked, titillation for some and embarrassment for others. All this because a woman snuck into the priesthood disguised as a man and in time was promoted from a notary in the curia, to Cardinal, who got herself a lover and was eventually chosen as the bishop of Rome.
The Vatican’s Pope groping chair
From the mid-13th to the 17th century the tradition that there was a female pope, commonly but not invariably named Joan, at some date in the 10th or 11th century, was almost universally accepted. The story first appeared, between 1240 and 1250, in the Universal Chronicle of Metz (a city in France’s northeastern Grand Est region) attributed to the Dominican Jean de Mailly. Who stated that John/Joan succeeded Pope Victor III (d. 1087).
However, there are other documented narrations of female popes at various times through history, Whether the same Pope Joan or Joanna from the 9th to the 11th century by various church clerical authors, but there was an Agnes, Gilberta, Jutta or some nameless female popes.
Joan was eventually betrayed when mounting a horse, she gave birth to a child, and was ignominiously tied to the horse’s tail and dragged around the city, and then stoned to death.
Today we know her as Pope Joan, and owing to the disgrace to the male bastion the RCC, the church has tried to suppress the history of Joan or Joanna or Agnes or Gilberta or Jutta.
More information of Joan can be gleaned on page 329 of the Oxford Dictionary of Popes (1986 edition), by J.N.D. Kelly
What do you say, on the female pope or popes?
Cofion
Jero Jones