Pope Joan

It is a matter of fact  that all the priests of the Roman Catholic Church are men.  The church says that this is because Jesus was a man and that all his disciples were men.  The Church says that its duty is to follow the example of Jesus.  For that reason it would be wrong to have women priests.  But there is a strange legend that during the Dark Ages a woman was elected Pope!  The Roman Catholic Church has debunked this idea but yet the story just won’t go away.  What exactly is the truth behind this story?

The first person to mention this story was Jean de Mailly writing the Chronicles of Metz in the early 13th Century.  He wrote that there was a pope who was nowhere to be found in the Catholic Church’s official list of popes.  This pope he claimed was a woman disguised as a man.  She had become a Curial Secretary, then a Cardinal before being elected Pope.  De Mailly wrote that one day as she was mounting a horse she gave birth to a child.  The crowd was horrified at this event and pounced on her.  They tied her feet to the tail of a horse and she was dragged and stoned until she was dead.  She was buried where she died.  De Mailly claims all this happened in the year 1099.

Writing a little later but still in the 13th Century Martin of Opava adds more details.  He names the Pope John Anglicus who was born in Mainz.  Martin claims that this Papacy lasted two years, seven months and four days, coming between Benedict 111 and Nicholas 1 in the 850’s.  When just a girl she was taken to Athens, (dressed as a man), by her lover.  She was highly intelligent and studied hard and when they moved to Rome she taught the liberal arts (the trivium). She did this so well that she impressed the intelligentsia and was appointed Pope.  She became pregnant by her lover and gave birth during a procession from St. Peter’s to the Lateran.

Renaissance writers copy these stories but add essential differences.  In one she is the daughter of a Pope , is not killed but deposed, and eventually is appointed Bishop of Hostia.  In others she is regarded almost as saintly and miracles are attributed to her.  Then as one might guess,  in the 17th Century when there was high tension and division between Protestant and Catholic and in many cases open hostility, an anonymous volume purporting to be an account of “Pope Joan” and her “Bastard Son”, appeared. This added to the philosophical attacks on Catholicism and increased the divisions in society.

Pope Joan with tiara as the Whore of Babylon (Wikipedia)

But what can we make of this?  First of all we must note that the first mention we have of this story comes approximately four hundred years after the supposed event.  If this story were true would not other writers not have mentioned it?  Probably, but if they did it is quite likely the Church would have tried to suppress it.  The Catholic Church has examined the story of Martin of Opava and has shown that there was no interval between Benedict 111 and Nicholas 1.  Other writers have pointed out that between the end of the 11th Century and the start of the 12th Century there were antipopes  and some of the legitimate papacies were not in Rome.  This theory fits in with de Mailly’s account as he dates it as happening  in 1099.

Mull over this story and try to decide, ” Was there a Pope Joan?”  I must confess that although I have thought about this for years I am completely unable to come down on one side or the other.  I wish you the best of luck!