{"id":57,"date":"2008-04-16T13:58:55","date_gmt":"2008-04-16T13:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/daily-pope-question-no-3.html"},"modified":"2008-04-16T13:58:55","modified_gmt":"2008-04-16T13:58:55","slug":"daily-pope-question-no-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/daily-pope-question-no-3.html","title":{"rendered":"Daily Pope Question No. 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Yes, I’m a day behind, but please forgive.)
\nToday’s question regards the debate over whether there was once a woman pope–a story that has had a longer life than even “The Da Vinci Code”…
\nQ: Was there really a Pope Joan?
\nRead more from the papal answer man, Chris Bellitto<\/a> and his new book, 101 Questions on Popes and the Papacy<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n


\nA: No, there was not a Pope Joan, but why the legend of the popess has lasted is itself an interesting story.
\n\"Bellitto%20Book%20Cover.jpg\"First, let\u2019s look at the legend, which has no basis in fact: none of the facts, names, dates, and places fit into the historical record. According to the stories, which began in the thirteenth century, at some point in the centuries before that an intelligent and literate woman had disguised herself as a man, began a career as a scribe, and over time achieved a number of successively higher church positions, including cardinal and then pope. After several years, this pope was discovered to be a woman when she delivered a child as she climbed into a horse\u2019s saddle or while riding in procession between St. Peter\u2019s and the Lateran. Following various versions of the story, a crowd that witnessed the event pulled her down to beat her, tied her to the horse\u2019s tail, or stoned her to death. So common was the story that learned Italian humanists like Petrarch and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century mentioned her; a sculpture of a Pope Joan was even placed alongside other popes in a Siena cathedral around that time.
\nSecond, let\u2019s look at why the legend lasted. One group of people might use it to try to prove that a woman should not be a priest\u2014let alone the pope\u2014while others employ the legend to make the opposite point: a woman\u2019s smarts are what counts and if she can do the job, she should be able to. It may be that the legend was a way of representing the fact that some powerful Roman women had played a major role in selecting popes around the turn of the first millennium. Other legends grew out of it, especially the false notion that medieval popes had to sit on a chair with a hole in it\u2014something like an elaborate chamberpot\u2014so they could be inspected and proven to be male.
\nAs you can imagine, the legend of Pope Joan became a popular rallying point for Protestant critics and Catholic defenders in the sixteenth and following centuries, although it was ironically a French Protestant who categorically refuted the legend in the seventeenth century. As with so much of what we have been discussing in this book, it is important to separate fact from fiction, to understand why the fictions persist, and to learn from informed history and not rumor or hearsay.
\n–From “101 Questions on Popes and the Papacy” by Christopher M. Bellitto; published by the Paulist Press and reprinted with permission of the publisher. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Yes, I’m a day behind, but please forgive.) Today’s question regards the debate over whether there was once a woman pope–a story that has had a longer life than even “The Da Vinci Code”… Q: Was there really a Pope Joan? Read more from the papal answer man, Chris Bellitto and his new book, 101…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nDaily Pope Question No. 3 - Benedictions: The Pope in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/daily-pope-question-no-3.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Daily Pope Question No. 3 - Benedictions: The Pope in America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"(Yes, I’m a day behind, but please forgive.) Today’s question regards the debate over whether there was once a woman pope–a story that has had a longer life than even “The Da Vinci Code”… Q: Was there really a Pope Joan? 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Today’s question regards the debate over whether there was once a woman pope–a story that has had a longer life than even “The Da Vinci Code”… Q: Was there really a Pope Joan? 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}