Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk
Cross, 2009, Excerpts
Life in these troubled times (800 AD) was
especially difficult for women. It was a misogynistic age, informed by the
antifemale diatribes of church fathers such as St. Paul and Tertullian. Menstrual
blood was believed to turn wine sour, make crops barren, take the edge off
steel, make iron rust, and infect dog bites with an incurable poison. With few
exceptions, women were treated as perpetual minors, with no legal or property
rights. By law, they could be beaten by their husbands. Rape was treated as a form
of minor theft. The education of women was discouraged, for a learned woman was
considered not only unnatural but dangerous.
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 report of the embarrassing episode. Indeed, they would have felt it
their duty to do so.
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.
First Timothy, chapter two, verses eleven and
twelve. She knew it well enough. It was a quotation from St. Paul: “I do not
permit a woman to be a teacher, nor must a woman domineer over a man; she
should be quiet and listen with due submission.”
Pope Dung
Seat
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 (usually a deacon) solemnly informed the gathered people, “Mas nobis
dominus est”—“Our Lord Pope is a man.” Only then was the Pope handed the keys
of St. Peter. This ceremony continued until the sixteenth century.
The Catholic Church does not deny the existence of
the pierced seat, for it survives in Rome to this day. Nor does anyone deny the
fact that it was used for centuries in the ceremony of papal consecration. But
many argue that the chair was used merely because of its handsome and
impressive appearance; the fact that it had a hole in it is, they say, quite
irrelevant.
Female pope film sparks
Vatican row
22
Jun 2010
Blockbuster Hollywood films such as The Da Vinci
Code, and its prequel, Angels and Demons, have often fallen foul of the Vatican
in recent years. Now a new movie looks set to spark anger in the Holy See due
to its depiction of a female pontiff. Pope Joan, based on American novelist
Donna Woolfolk Cross's book of the same name. The film is based on persistent
rumors that a female pope existed in the ninth century. She was said to have
disguised herself as a man and risen to the favor of the previous pope due to
her great learning and intellect. But after a reign of several years, she gave
birth to a baby during a papal procession and was torn apart by an angry mob.
The legend of Pope Joan first appeared in the 13th
century, and subsequently spread across Europe. There are a number of factors
that are advanced by proponents of the story to suggest that a female pope
really did exist. Firstly, they point to the existence of a wooden chair with a
hole in the base, the sella stercoraria, which it is claimed was used during
papal investiture ceremonies to ensure potential pontiffs were male. The chair
is now kept in the Vatican museum. Secondly, the route between the Basilica of
St John Lateran and St Peter's in Rome, where Joan was supposedly unmasked, was
traditionally avoided by popes from the 13th century onwards, possibly in
deference to the legend. The story of the female pontiff was previously
examined in the little-known 1972 film Pope Joan, featuring Ingmar Bergman muse
Liv Ullmann. That film was revived and re-edited, using previously unseen
footage, into a different feature, She ... Who Would Be Pope, last year.
