Was there Once a Female Pope?

Kelly Patterson, in the Ottawa Citizen (5-1-05):

Crammed along the Via Sacra in Rome, thousands of faithful hold their breath in anticipation. At long last, the new pope, in full regalia, comes into view, wending his way from St. Peter's to the Lateran Basilica.

Suddenly the primate crumples to the ground, doubled over in pain. The crowd gasps in horror: the Pope is giving birth!

Yes, under those fetching robes, Pope John VIII was really Pope Joan, the most daring cross-dresser in history, believers say.

Joan, who reigned from AD 853 to 855, was stoned to death on the spot by the incensed mob, they say. According to another version, she was dispatched to a distant convent; her child grew up to become the Bishop of Ostia.

It sounds like the mother of all urban legends, but to this day Pope Joan has a surprisingly large and loyal following, with non-fiction books and (of course) websites preaching the gospel that there was once a papa femina.

American writer Donna Woolfolk Cross's 1996 novel on the subject is already in its 12th printing; it is wildly popular in Europe, where it has been among the top 10 sellers in Germany for two years, according to the publisher. This year Academy Award-winning director Volker Schlondorf is turning the novel into a movie, with Michael Hirst (Elizabeth) penning the script, Random House says. A previous movie starring Liv Ullmann came out in 1972.

More intriguingly, the Catholic Church itself accepted Pope Joan as fact for hundreds of years. "In the 14th and 15th centuries this popess was already counted as an historical personage, whose existence no one doubted," the Catholic Encyclopedia says.

Indeed, a bust of Joan even stood among those of all the other popes in Siena Cathedral until 1601, when Clement VIII ordered it to be replaced by that of Pope Zacharius. In his 1413 trial for heresy, Jan Hus cited Joan's existence as evidence of papal fallibility: While his other examples of papal sin and error were vigorously attacked, none of his prosecutors questioned that one, Donna Cross says.

And some say that if the 600-year-old practice hadn't been abandoned some time in the 16th century, our own Joseph Ratzinger would have had to undergo a bizarre ceremony invented to keep out any other transvestite popes: Perched on a pierced seat known as "the groping chair," the prospective pope would allow an attendant to verify his gender by hand.

"And in order to demonstrate his worthiness, his testicles are felt by the junior present as testimony of his male sex," wrote one 15th-century source cited in Rosemary and Darrell Pardoe's book, The Female Pope: The Mystery of Pope Joan.

"When this is found to be so, the person who feels them shouts out in a loud voice, 'testiculos habet' (he has testicles). And all the clerics reply, 'Deo Gratias' (thanks be to God)."

The Vatican acknowledges that a pierced chair was used in papal inaugurations through the Middle Ages -- in fact, it still has one of these chairs -- but denies it was used in a groping ceremony. Scholars don't know why the chair, which was either a commode or a birthing chair, was used.

While one version has Joan reigning in the 11th century, but the best-known account, by the 13th-century scholar Martin of Troppau, says she succeeded Leo IV (847-855). Raised in Mainz by English missionaries, she began cross-dressing to be with her tutor and lover.

At 12, she left for Athens, where she "made such progress in various sciences that there was nobody equal to her," according to Martin of Troppau. They then moved to Rome, where she quickly rose through the ranks, to be unanimously elected pope. She supposedly became pregnant by one of her attendants.

But Patrick Madrid, author of the 1999 book, Pope Fiction, scoffs at the story, pointing out that not a word about Pope Joan can be found in any records until some 300 years after her death. While it's true the Vatican could have later purged any evidence of Joan's existence from its official records, it could never have suppressed the story from popular versions, nor could it have controlled the writings of its enemies, of which there were many in the turbulent Dark Ages, he writes....