There was a female Pope, her bust was amoung the busts of other Popes until Clement VIII had her bust reworked and changed her name to Pope Zacherias in the16 th century.
pope
Hello Boomie. Is this the article you are talking about?
It is customary to provide a link to the column in question, which I am more than happy to do for you-I assume you are referring to this classic column from 1987.
Would you happen to have a cite for your assertion?
You mean the Pope Joan hoax?
That WIKI article includes this surprising detail:
From my reading, it doesn’t appear that the bust itself was considered apocryphal.
Why would there be a bust of a person who was never Pope included with other papal figures?
I’m not arguing that there was a female pope, just that having a bust of a non-pope in with actual popes seems odd.
It isn’t a hoax unless you can get someone to believe it.
I think you didn’t catch the fact that the series of busts was made after the legend was engendered, and probably was intended to establish the accuracy of the story so much as to reflect the then currency of the story. When the Church finally had had enough of the silly story, they moved to do away with such “evidence.”
John VIII was a real and male pope.
So was Pope Zachary.
Ok, I’ve read the article from Cecil and I’ve become nonplussed regarding this:
And then nothing is mentioned about it again. While I’d like to believe the teeming millions and of course, Wikipedia is the font of all knowledge - I want to here it from the organ grinder (as promised) and not the legion of monkeys.
boomie–you got any proof of your unsubstanciated (sp?) claim?
Don’t hold your breath. boomie posted once in 2008, for 20 seconds.
Sorry, I realize that this is a bump - but the email from the SD resurrected this subject and I’m sure that it’s considered courteous to post in an existing thread instead of constructing a new one
That presumably refers to the parenthetical remark concerning three early 10th century popes:
It can’t be a hoax! The People’s Almanac said it was true. If Pope Joan wasn’t true, that could mean the story in the People’s Almanac about the farmer who disappeared into another dimension in his cornfield was also false. (You could allegedly hear his voice from a certain spot, but couldn’t see him) And, that people don’t spontaneously combust.
Next thing you’ll tell me is that not everything in “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” was true.
Hey, he said “Not,” didn’t he? Why would he put Not in the title if he sometimes didn’t expect Not to be the answer? If he were a lying bastard, he would have called his column Believe It.
The real question is why someone else didn’t call his column, The Straight Dope or Not. 
Technically, that phrase means “this is true whether or not you believe it”, rather than “this may or may not be true”.