Whenever you see a legend, you can be sure, if you go to the very bottom of things, that you will find history. (Vallet de Viriville) Pope Joan is one of the most fascinating, extraordinary characters in Western history -- and one of the least well known. Most 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. dreamscape/morgana/popejoan.htm
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 20:13:14 +0000
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