3 ms·

Adult male Catholics, surely?

• rsynnott 5mo ago
  ... Maybe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan (She probably didn't actually exist, but it's interesting that until quite recently she was generally believed to have existed.)
  • drybjed 5mo ago
    What do you mean? Catcholic Church has records, did they just came up with something about a nonexistent Pope Joan out of thin air? How could they...
    • rsynnott 5mo ago
      Catholic Church's records on early popes are often surprisingly bad, particularly in antipope-heavy eras. There are a _number_ of popes where the detail is pretty vague. Use of damnatio memoriae also confuses the issue, eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Formosus#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Formosus#Legacy
      • karel-3d 5mo ago
        eh not really, we NOW have quite good records on most popes except for the first few ones that we get just in a list from St Irenaeus (for example from St Linus - the guy immediately after St Peter - we get almost nothing) but about the middle age popes we know quite a lot NOW. But it used to be different.
  • swat535 5mo ago
    Yes, that was satire, in Latin, John is spelled Joannes, or Joan for short.