Amatoritsero Ede<\/span><\/p>\n It is surprising that the world was surprised at, or by, the recent little drama in The Church as one sitting pope resigned and another ascended the throne of Peter. For waywardness, that event is insignificant compared to several papal commotions during the Middle Ages in Europe. Although it is a literary work, Geoffrey Chaucer\u2019s satirical Canterbury Tales<\/i> (1475) is, in part, a useful sociological, albeit fictionalised, account of medieval ethical and moral clerical excesses. One variant of that was the \u2018selling\u2019 of indulgences to believers. Professional \u2018pardoners\u2019 granted shrift in exchange for lucre. One of the colourful characters through whom Chaucer focalises his searching narrative is the satirical figure, \u2018The Pardoner.’ In \u201cThe Pardoner\u2019s Tale\u201d that protagonist mocks the clergy, whom he personifies, by declaring:<\/p>\n If gifts your change of heart and mind reveal, Chaucer wrote of a time when faith was on its knees like a sinner or a shrunken beggar, a time when the steeple was as crooked as the tilting tower of Pisa. This was the dark ages in clerical as well as in any other term: popes fought for office like the nastiest of mafia bosses; devilish intrigue and executions were not exempt.<\/p>\n For example the phenomenon now described as the Western schism, consolidated between 1378 and 1417, was a situation in which an official pope and one or two equally legitimate \u2018antipopes\u2019 existed simultaneously between Rome and Avignon, France. The height of such political brouhaha was 1409 when three holinesses co-existed, installed one after the other by the same conclave of disgruntled cardinals in that one unholy instance. Across the ages the Holy See sees to it that wicked entertainment is provided its admirers, secular and lay alike. But no histrionic compares to the catastrophe \u2013 for a very misogynist clergy \u2013 of accidentally installing a female pope in Rome or Avignon in the ninth century (?).<\/p>\n If true, that is probably the first serious documented case of \u2018passing\u2019 in history \u2013 way ahead of its appearance in slave-owning America when bi- or multi-racial slaves who looked white enough simply passed for white and lived a more humane existence. Women in the medieval period were not much more than cattle \u2013 just like the Slavic people from whom the word \u2018slave\u2019 derives. And since poor nutrition and the shaven heads of priests, not to talk of cross-dressing amongst the clergy, bent the features of man or woman to a sexless blur, it was possible for the latter to pass by crossing genders and thus escaping slavish conditions towards upward social mobility. This is much within the same existential goals, which made Slavs convert to Christianity because The Church declared that the Christian ideal precluded a follower of Christ from being a slave. Medieval gender and social transgressions provided the opportunity such that a certain John Anglicus who \u00a0\u2018had no balls\u2019 could nevertheless become a man, a priest \u2013 and a pope (?).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n An embarrassed Church vigorously refutes the existence of Her holiness, Popess Joan \u2013 La papessa<\/i>.\u00a0 She is myth or legend, the result of medieval protestant anti-church propaganda, and a figment of our modern imagination. All that despite over five hundred ancient monastic chronicles of her existence and irrespective of evidence from pre-modern art, in architecture, in the<\/em> literature and in literature \u2013 a chapter of Giovanni Boccaccio\u2019s Famous Women<\/i> (1374) focuses on her, myth or no myth. This mysterious lady pope is an elephant in the room, visible and invisible all at once. Be that as it may. Perhaps she never actually existed. There is however an aspect of this legend that suggests otherwise.<\/p>\n The story concludes that Popess Joan was unmasked during a procession. She went into labour and gave birth in broad daylight, right under scandalised Roman noses. Since that ancient \u2018tragedy\u2019 a checking of the candidate\u2019s phallic \u2018vitals\u2019 precedes every papal selection. He sits in a special tall chair cut out in the middle such that his balls might hang and is visible to observing cardinals, who walk by in a file. The ritual is completed with the conclave individually bearing witness and declaiming in Latin as it files past: \u2018testiculos habet et bene pendentes!;\u2019 meaning roughly, \u2018testicles he has and they hang well!\u2019\u00a0 Or simply in the vernacular, \u2018he is well-hung!\u2019<\/p>\n If that account is true, then there is no stronger proof of the existence of a distant female pope than this clerical phallic annunciation. The shadow of that matriarch is so overpowering that she practically make boys out of men, such that they must play with each other\u2019s balls and prove their maleness, bene-bene-pendentes<\/i>. Ironically, the only serious proof of La Papessa<\/i>\u2019s existence is that very act of her historical denial and erasure by a hysterical clergy. This is anxiously marked in time by the viewing of scrotums, the joyous declamations; by the pendulous swaying of testicles \u2013 ree-roo-raa \u2013 blown by woman-harsh religious winds as they depend down from the high ritual chair; and, of course, by the jubilant erection rocking that chair in spiritual ecstasy and patriarchal triumph! At least no eunuch or woman is supposed to sit there. In short the whole ceremony of papal installation since La Papessa<\/i> is fixated on the phallus, swollen, aggressive and misogynist. Why must this tiny bit of muscle have such dizzying sway – ree-roo-raa- over male clerical senses? The answer might be religio-psychosocial.<\/p>\n Christian iconography is replete with phallic symbols, the most immediately visible being the church steeple, and the not so obvious ubiquitous \u2018cross,\u2019 very much phallic in its original ancient Babylonian design and pagan sexualised intent. These two icons will suffice although other near inexhaustible examples exist \u2013 especially of the textual, linguistic sort within a scripture almost entirely written by men, except for the book of Ruth. The result of ancient religious male chauvinism is this primitive clerical masculinist and Hobbesian arrogance in the twenty first century, which excludes women \u2013 and persecutes children.<\/p>\n It is persecution for the child when that ungainly weight, the-ree-the-roo-the-raa of the swinging phallus, pulls many a holy man asunder and he crumbles before the image of an helpless alter boy. Only a detachment from that pendulous weight will provide any kind of stability for the body of Christ. And detachment can only come if the pulpit overcomes its original fear \u2013 a woman pope. Until La Papessa<\/i> returns that bodily clock will continue to tick, sway and whirr \u2013 the ree the roo the raa! Church and state will not know rest.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Ree, the Roo, the Raa!; or Bene Bene Pendentes! Amatoritsero Ede It is surprising that the world was surprised at, or by, the recent little drama in The Church as one sitting pope resigned and another ascended the throne of Peter. For waywardness, that event is insignificant compared to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":238,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1259","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1317,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1259\/revisions\/1317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n You’ll get my absolution while you kneel.
\n Come forth, and kneel down here before, anon,
\n And humbly you’ll receive my full pardon;
\n Or else receive a pardon as you wend,
\n All new and fresh as every mile shall end,
\n So that you offer me each time, anew,
\n More gold and silver, all good coins and true.<\/p>\n