Truth or Myth? There is a female pope!

While reading old, very old pasugo issues^_^ ,

there was an article that caught my attention, in the latter part it says about that there is a female pope. It quoted the book The people's Almanac by David Wallenchinsky and Irving Wallace. I really dont know about this, but let i show what it contains, here it is:

Joan Anglicus (818-855)

Pope of Rome...
The Vatican has many secretes. Perhaps its most carefully guarded one throughout history is this: that for 2 years, 5months, and 4 days, between 853 and 855 A.D, the Pope was a woman.

Somewhere between Pope Leo IV (847-855) and Pope Benedict III (855-858), Joan, in the lifelong guise of a man, rose to the highest seat in Roman Catholic Church. She rule 2 1/2 years and would have ruled longer except that her true gender was exposed after a love affair that resulted in her giving birth to a boy during a public ceremony.
For 3 centuries, the Catholic Church has attempted to dismiss her as a myth, although over 150 church historians between the 13th and 17th centuries acknowledge her short reign...

Things were going well enough until in the 2nd year of her reign, she fell in love with her private chaimberlain, a blond youth of 20 named Florus. They became lovers, and to her horror, Joan found herself pregnant. She hoped to escape the Vatican for a period, to bear the child in secrecy and be rid of it, but circumstances kept her confined.

Then one day during a ceremonial procession from St. Peter's to the Lateran Palace, while she rode a horseback, she suffered the pangs of premature childbirth. The procession was halted. She was lifted from her horse and fell to the street and before the eyes of an astounded mob a premature infant was produced among the voluminous folds of the papal vestments.

The crowd, upon realizing that it was not a miracle but in fact a deception became enraged. Joan was tied to the tail of her horse, dragged through the streets of Rome and back to the spot where she has been exposed; there she was stoned to death.

Just today i make some researches about her, but in the blogs/sites ive been, some says it was a myth, some says it really happened. Here are the links, but it is better to make your own research about this!^_^

wikipedia
socyberty.com
popejoan.com

[Excerpted from the Author's Notes section of Pope Joan: A Novel by Donna Woolfolk Cross, with the author's permission.]

Pope Joan is one of the most fascinating, extraordinary characters in Western history -- and one of the least well known. osMt people have never heard of Joan the Pope, and those who have regard her story as legend.

Yet for hundreds of years -- up to the middle of the seventeenth century -- Joan’s papacy was universally known and accepted as truth. In the seventeenth century, the Catholic Church, under increasing attack from rising Protestantism, began a concerted effort to destroy the embarrassing historical records on Joan.

Hundreds of manuscripts and books were seized by the Vatican. Joan’s virtual disappearance from modern consciousness attests to the effectiveness of these measures. Today the Catholic Church offers two principal arguments against Joan’s papacy: the absence of any reference to her in contemporary documents, and the lack of a sufficient period of time for her papacy to have taken place between the end of the reign of her predecessor, Leo IV, and the beginning of the reign of her successor, Benedict III.

These arguments are not, however, conclusive. It is scarcely surprising that Joan does not appear in contemporary records, given the time and energy the Church has, by its own admission, devoted to expunging her from them. The fact that she lived in the ninth century, the darkest of the dark ages, would have made the job of obliterating her papacy easy. The ninth century was a time of widespread illiteracy, marked by an extraordinary dearth of record keeping.

Today, scholarly research into the period relies on scattered, incomplete, contradictory, and unreliable documents. There are no court records, land surveys, farming accounts, or diaries of daily life. Except for one questionable history, the Liber pontificalis (which scholars have called a "propagandist document"), there is no continuous record of the ninth-century Popes -- who they were, when the reigned, what they did.

Apart from the Liber pontificalis, scarcely a mention can be found of Joan’s successor, Pope Benedict III -- and he was not the target of an extermination campaign. 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. Indeed, they would have felt it their duty to do so.

Even the great theologian Alcuin was not above tampering with the truth; in one of his letters he admits destroying a report on Pope Leo III’s adultery and simony. One need only look to the recent examples of Nicaragua and El Salvador to see how a determined and well-coordinated state effort can make embarrassing evidence "disappear." It is only after the distancing effect of time that truth, kept alive by unquenchable popular report, gradually begins to emerge. And, indeed, there is no shortage of documentation for Joan’s papacy in later centuries.

Frederick Spanheim, the learned German historian who conducted and extensive study of the matter, cites no fewer than five hundred ancient manuscripts containing accounts of Joan’s papacy, including those of such acclaimed authors as Petrarch and Boccaccio. Today, the church position on Joan is that she was an invention of Protestant reformers eager to expose papist corruption.

Yet Joan’s story first appeared hundreds of years before Martin Luther was born. Most of her chroniclers were Catholics, often highly placed in the church hierarchy. Joan’s story was accepted even in official histories dedicated to Popes. Her statue stood undisputed alongside those of the other Popes in the Cathedral of Siena until 1601, when, by command of Pope Clement VIII, it suddenly "metamorphosed" into a bust of Pope Zacharias.

In 1276, after ordering a thorough search of the papal records, Pope John XX changed his title to John XXI in official recognition of Joan’s reign as Pope John VIII. Joan’s story was included in the official church guidebook to Rome used by pilgrims for over three hundred years. Another striking piece of historical evidence is found in the well-documented 1413 trial of Jan Hus for heresy. Hus was condemned for preaching the heretical doctrine that the Pope is fallible. In his defense Hus cited, during the trial, many examples of Popes who had sinned and committed crimes against the Church. To each of these charges his judges, all churchmen, replied in minute detail, denying Hus’s accusations and labeling them blasphemy.

Only one of Hus’s statements went unchallenged: "Many times have the Popes fallen into sin and error, for instance when Joan was elected Pope, who was a woman." No one of the 28 cardinals, four patriarchs, 30 metropolitans, 206 bishops, and 440 theologians present charged Hus with lying or blaspheming in this statement. There is also circumstantial evidence difficult to explain if there was never a female Pope. One example is the so-called chair exam, part of the medieval papal consecration ceremony for almost six hundred years. Each newly elected Pope after Joan sat on the sella stercoraria (literally, "dung seat"), pierced in the middle like a toilet, where his genitals were examined to give proof of his manhood.

Afterward the examiner solemnly informed the gathered people, "Mas nobis nominus est" -- "Our nominee is a man." Only then was the Pope handed the keys of St. Peter. This ceremony continued until the sixteenth century. Another interesting piece of circumstantial evidence is the "shunned street." The Patriarchium, the Pope’s residence and episcopal cathedral (now St. John Lateran) is located on the opposite side of Rome from St. Peter’s Basilica; papal processions therefore frequently traveled between them.

A quick perusal of any map of Rome will show that the Via Sacra (now the Via S. Giovanni) is by far the shortest and most direct route between these two locations -- and so in fact it was used for centuries (hence the name Via Sacra, or "sacred road"). This is the street on which Joan reportedly gave birth to her stillborn child. Soon afterward, papal processions deliberately began to turn aside from the Via Sacra.

As for the Church’s second argument, that there was not sufficient time between the papacies of Leo IV and Benedict III for Joan to have reigned -- this too is questionable. The Liber pontificalis is notoriously inaccurate with regard to the times of papal accessions and deaths; many of the dates cited are known to be wholly invented. Given the strong motivation of a contemporary chronicler to conceal Joan’s papacy, it would be no great surprise if the date of Leo’s death was moved forward from 853 to 855 -- through the time of Joan’s reported two-year reign -- in order to make it appear that Pope Leo was immediately succeeded by Pope Benedict III.
source: dreamscape.com

Im sure Catholic Officials, Catholics and etc will just laugh on this, for they believe what is the explanation of their popes/church itself in this issue that this is just a myth, making theirself bias and unprofessional. Like the first comment on this post, just to cover this shameful event, im not surprised.^_^

MY CONCLUSION:

On my researches, they say it is not true for they believe:

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"...because Leo IV died 17 July, 855, and immediately after his death Benedict III was elected by the clergy and people of Rome;..."

in short there is no place for her to reign, as what they say...

another is that she has no document files or proof of her existence, historians doesnt know about her and etc...


If it is not true that "Pope Joan" didnt existed,
why then many knows about this controversy?
If it is only an invented story, why then it is not make to end?
or the historians make a confirmation that a female pope did not exist?


Well then, if i believe that Joan Anglicus existed, bravo to the Vatican! Dont be surprised for there are many secrets in the Catholic Church! Dont be surprised if she didnt recognized as an official pope! If she really existed, and there is denial, it only means that the Vatican hide and cover the history about her, maybe change what really happened and make their own stories so that this happenings will treat by people only as a legend or myth!

If "Pope Joan" really existed, why then Catholic Church deny her?
Simple answer. The Catholic Church has its doctrine that says the pope is infallible! And lets say in the book of Donna Woolfolk Cross is true that other popes commit sin, and they destroy the reports about them, DONT BE SURPRISED! It is their tactic so that they will not loose their members in the lie that the Popes are holy, infallible and does not make errors!

I also look the list of popes in wikipedia and i did not find any Joan Anglicus/John Anglicus, but it doesnt mean that she really did not existed!

Catholic Church is very powerful, it is not impossible for them if they twist the historical happenings in the past, and if they command that that event of having a female pope in the church be erased. We didnt know what exactly happened, so, even i, i cannot confirm if it is really happened. maybe? maybe not.

The truth, there are many secrets in the Vatican and only showed after so many years, like the abuse cases of the priests, only just these days victims are all showing because Catholic Church covers the truth in the past so that shameful events will not occur, but sorry to the RCC,

THERE IS NO SECRET THAT WILL NOT BE REVEALED...