Hi
The Papal Groping Chair for Newly Elected Popes, Courtesy of Pope Joan!
For close to 800 years, every pope has gone through a gender check on receiving the so-called keys of Peter. A test in which new popes have to get their scrotum and genitalia checked. Titillation for some and embarrassment for others would be popes. 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. Since the death of Pope Francis, some commentators have suggested that a female pope should be chosen. Commentators such as JMallett, smokeys48, Scotte, and others have mentioned a female pope being elected during the next conclave to elect a successor to the See of Peter. Well, this has been and gone like the second coming or the tribulation. The date of the female imposter, Pope Joan, is shrouded in mystery, with the papacy suppressing any and all information on the dastardly story.
Pope Joan, a female pope—surely that broke the myth of ‘apostolic succession’? On Pope Joan, the scholar Kelly wrote: From the mid-13th to the 17th cent., the tradition that there had been a female pope, commonly but not invariably named Joan, at some date in the 9th, 10th, or 11th cent. was almost universally accepted; it was still furnishing ammunition to attackers of the papacy and the Roman church in the late 19th cent. The story first appears, between 1240 and 1250, in the Universal Chronicle of Metz attributed to the Dominican Jean de Mailly, according to which Victor III (d. 1087) was succeeded by a talented woman who, disguised as a man, had worked her way up in the curia as a notary and had eventually been promoted to cardinal. She was betrayed when mounting her horse; she gave birth to a child and was ignominiously tied to the horse’s tail, dragged round the city, and then stoned to death. The Dominican Stephen de Bourbon (d. c. 1262) and the Franciscan of Erfurt, who wrote (c. 1265) the Chronicon minor gave broadly similar accounts of the affair of the ‘popess’, the one placing it c. 1100 and the other c. 915. The tale was given definitive form, however, and a very wide diffusion by the later editions of the immensely popular and influential Chronicle of Popes and Emperors by Polish Dominican Martin of Troppau (d. 1297).
According to these sources, Leo IV (d. 855) was succeeded by one John Anglicus, who reigned two years, seven months, and four days but was in fact a woman. A native of Mainz, she went as a girl, dressed in a man’s clothes but escorted by her lover, to Athens, had a brilliant student career there, and then settled in Rome, where her lectures attracted such distinguished audiences and her life was so edifying that she was unanimously elected pope. Her imposture was finally exposed when, riding in procession from St Peter’s to the Lateran, she gave birth to a child in a narrow street between the Colosseum and S. Clemente. She died on the spot and was buried there; because of the shameful episode, popes thereafter studiously avoided travelling the street.
While Martin gives her name as John (i.e., Joan or Joanna in the feminine), other accounts call her Agnes, Gilberta, or Jutta or leave her nameless… [JND Kelly (1986), The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, p. 329, Oxford University Press, Oxford – New York.]
What do you say about part or all of this discussion?
Cofion
R&I ~ MJM
Jero Jones
Article URL : https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/discuss/