On Sat, 06 Sep 2003 16:28:28 +0200, Darko Majdic
 wrote:
>>Ma jesu, po nekoliko istodobno... A jednom je cak i zena bila papa.
>
>Danijele, za ozbiljan studij povijesti Crkve preporuÄ?am Huberta
>Jedina. Ako Ä?e?? prouÄ?avati povijest Crkve iz pamfleta koji navode tu
>legendarnu papisu Ivanu mislim da Ä?e?? malo nauÄ?iti. ? to se tiÄ?e
>protupapa, nisu se prvi protupape u povijesti pojavili za vrijeme
>Avignona. Bilo ih je i prije.

Koliko sam ja shvatio "anti-papa" je jedan od dvojice samoproglasenih
papa koji je imao manje politicke moci iza sebe, pa je onaj drugi
prevladao. :) Sve u svemu, malo sam upucen u povijest crkve, i bojim
se da je ona daleko manje ruzicasta i linearna, nego katolici
pokusavaju stvoriti dojam.
A sto se "legendarne papise" tice, nije ti to bas toliko legenda,
koliko je crkva dala sve od sebe da unisti povijesne podatke o toj
svojoj sramoti:
...
Yet for hundreds of years -- up to the middle of the seventeenth
century -- Joanâ??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. Joanâ??s virtual disappearance
from modern consciousness attests to the effectiveness of these
measures. 

Today the Catholic Church offers two principal arguments against
Joanâ??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 Joanâ??s successor, Pope Benedict III
-- and he was not the target of an extermination campaign. 

Joanâ??s absence from contemporary church records is only to be
expected. The Roman clergymen of the day, appalled by the great
deception visited upon them, would have gone to great lengths to bury
all written reports of the embarrassing episode. Indeed, they would
have felt it their duty to do so. Even the great theologian Alcuin was
not above tampering with the truth; in one of his letters he admits
destroying a report on Pope Leo IIIâ??s adultery and simony. 

One need only look to the recent examples of Nicaragua and El Salvador
to see how a determined and well-coordinated state effort can make
embarrassing evidence "disappear." It is only after the distancing
effect of time that truth, kept alive by unquenchable popular report,
gradually begins to emerge. And, indeed, there is no shortage of
documentation for Joanâ??s papacy in later centuries. Frederick
Spanheim, the learned German historian who conducted and extensive
study of the matter, cites no fewer than five hundred ancient
manuscripts containing accounts of Joanâ??s papacy, including those of
such acclaimed authors as Petrarch and Boccaccio. 

Today, the church position on Joan is that she was an invention of
Protestant reformers eager to expose papist corruption. Yet Joanâ??s
story first appeared hundreds of years before Martin Luther was born.
Most of her chroniclers were Catholics, often highly placed in the
church hierarchy. Joanâ??s story was accepted even in official histories
dedicated to Popes. Her statue stood undisputed alongside those of the
other Popes in the Cathedral of Siena until 1601, when, by command of
Pope Clement VIII, it suddenly "metamorphosed" into a bust of Pope
Zacharias. In 1276, after ordering a thorough search of the papal
records, Pope John XX changed his title to John XXI in official
recognition of Joanâ??s reign as Pope John VIII. Joanâ??s story was
included in the official church guidebook to Rome used by pilgrims for
over three hundred years. 

Another striking piece of historical evidence is found in the
well-documented 1413 trial of Jan Hus for heresy. Hus was condemned
for preaching the heretical doctrine that the Pope is fallible. In his
defense Hus cited, during the trial, many examples of Popes who had
sinned and committed crimes against the Church. To each of these
charges his judges, all churchmen, replied in minute detail, denying
Husâ??s accusations and labeling them blasphemy. Only one of Husâ??s
statements went unchallenged: "Many times have the Popes fallen into
sin and error, for instance when Joan was elected Pope, who was a
woman." No one of the 28 cardinals, four patriarchs, 30 metropolitans,
206 bishops, and 440 theologians present charged Hus with lying or
blaspheming in this statement. 

There is also circumstantial evidence difficult to explain if there
was never a female Pope. One example is the so-called chair exam, part
of the medieval papal consecration ceremony for almost six hundred
years. Each newly elected Pope after Joan sat on the sella stercoraria
(literally, "dung seat"), pierced in the middle like a toilet, where
his genitals were examined to give proof of his manhood. Afterward the
examiner solemnly informed the gathered people, "Mas nobis nominus
est" -- "Our nominee is a man." Only then was the Pope handed the keys
of St. Peter. This ceremony continued until the sixteenth century. 

Another interesting piece of circumstantial evidence is the "shunned
street." The Patriarchium, the Popeâ??s residence and episcopal
cathedral (now St. John Lateran) is located on the opposite side of
Rome from St. Peterâ??s Basilica; papal processions therefore frequently
traveled between them. A quick perusal of any map of Rome will show
that the Via Sacra (now the Via S. Giovanni) is by far the shortest
and most direct route between these two locations -- and so in fact it
was used for centuries (hence the name Via Sacra, or "sacred road").
This is the street on which Joan reportedly gave birth to her
stillborn child. Soon afterward, papal processions deliberately began
to turn aside from the Via Sacra. 

As for the Churchâ??s second argument, that there was not sufficient
time between the papacies of Leo IV and Benedict III for Joan to have
reigned -- this too is questionable. The Liber pontificalis is
notoriously inaccurate with regard to the times of papal accessions
and deaths; many of the dates cited are known to be wholly invented.
Given the strong motivation of a contemporary chronicler to conceal
Joanâ??s papacy, it would be no great surprise if the date of Leoâ??s
death was moved forward from 853 to 855 -- through the time of Joanâ??s
reported two-year reign -- in order to make it appear that Pope Leo
was immediately succeeded by Pope Benedict III. 

http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/popejoan.htm

Sudeci po argumentima, vjerojatno je da se radilo o zbiljskoj osobi i
zbiljskoj sablazni, koju su katolici kasnije pokusali izbrisati iz
postojanja jer im je naprosto previse neugodna.