The She-Pope by Peter Stanford

Author:Peter Stanford [Peter Stanford]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1999-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Whoso doth the breeches wear

Lives a life as free as air.

Old French proverb

It was time to return to Rome. It was only four months since I had ambled out there in the spring sunshine, a bag full of crumpled clothes, novels and good intentions to do very little. And now here I was, complete with best suit, smart shoes that had never fitted since my wedding day, tape recorder, batteries, pencil, pad, camera and even a neater haircut, ready to try to be an insider in the city of the popes so as to pin down the truth about the She-Pope.

And there was no comfortably scruffy flat for my base this time round. It was booked out by holiday-makers revelling in the autumn sunshine. Instead I stayed just behind the Trevi Fountain in a brisk, business-like hotel whose starched mood matched my own and whose bedside tables were strong enough to support a pile of weighty reference books. Only Georgina Masson survived from first time around.

Top of my list of citadels to breach was the Vatican. One potential lead to be followed up there came with a 1970s’ version of Joan’s history. Written when feminist writers and historians were taking up the woman pope with gusto, Frenchman Henri Perrodo-Le Moyne’s 1972 account Un Pape Nomme Jeanne is a rather shrill polemic.1 In the final section, ‘Femmes, Levez-vous!’ – ‘Women arise’ – he concludes: ‘The day when woman frees herself, that day she will no longer be the “spare rib” . . . the papacy and the Church in its entirety will no longer blush concerning John VIII, the Papessa.’ Working himself up to this climax, Perrodo-Le Moyne recounts a meeting with an unnamed but senior Vatican prelate who ‘reveals’ that ‘some very important documents concerning this woman are secretly concealed in chests and under the papal seal’.

Though unimpressed by the book itself and its attempt to overlook historical detail in the rush to recruit Joan to a contemporary cause, this reference had made me pull up short. The Vatican’s Secret Archives – misnamed since its existence was never publicly denied, though access was barred to all but a chosen clerical few – might just have been behind this allusion. And, thanks to a new if tepid Vatican spirit of glasnost in dealing with journalists, it might just be possible to follow it up.

Until recently, the Vatican was one of the most secretive of societies. Probing writers made few inroads into the citadel, and even the most mundane of details – like what the Pope ate for breakfast – were treated with the same reverence as the third and terrible secret of Fatima, imparted by the Virgin Mary in a vision to a young Portuguese girl in 1917 and now known only to the Pope.

However, the bizarre events following the death of Pope John Paul I, when the Vatican’s inept attempts at news-management, covering up medical details and embellishing the pontiff’s last hours with pious details, merely inflamed curiosity and led to the publication of an international best-seller which speculated that he had been murdered.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.