The statue of Pope Joan still stands among the papal busts in the cathedral of Siena with the name Johannes VIII, femina ex Anglia.The Catholic Church is the only institution which has survived 2000 years.
With its wars, rises and falls, it bore secrets which later became legends or remained deeply hidden in old and well guarded documents.
One of these stories is the one that once, in the 9th century, the Church was led by a woman.
However, considering that this was an indescribable shame, the Church to cover everything up.
Pope Joan died while giving birth and threw shame on the Church
The female pope was called Joan, she was an Englishwoman who fell in love with a Benedictine monk and ran away with him to Athens disguised as a man.
After the death of her lover, Joan disguised as a man again and became a priest, then cardinal and eventually Pope John VIII.
However, she died while giving birth during a pope’s procession, and was a great shame for the Church.
As years went by, new versions of the stories came up, for example that Joan was the daughter of the pope and that she was killed after she was born.
The Vatican controlled the sex of the pope
Although there are is not much evidence in this story, her statue stands among papal busts in the cathedral of Siena, in Italy.
Under the busts you can read the words “Johannes VIII, femina ex Anglia”, in “English John VIII, Englishwoman”.
After a woman managed to take the highest position in the Church, the Vatican introduced additional security measures, so that something like that would never happen again.
All cardinals, who were candidates for becoming pope, had to sit on a chair (sella stercoraria) naked under their robes, with an opening on the bottom. Their colleagues stood under the and controlled the genitals in order to determinate the sex.
After the control came the decision: “Testiculus habet, et bene pendentes”, in English “He has testicles and they hang down well”.
This praxis was allegedly stopped in the 16th century.
Although many men of literature and historians wrote about Pope Joan, no one has officially confirmed that the story on her work ahead of the Church is true.
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