[NYer]

What is the Catholic League?
The Catholic League is the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization. Founded in 1973 by the late Father Virgil C. Blum, S.J., the Catholic League defends the right of Catholics – lay and clergy alike – to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination.
 

Motivated by the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment, the Catholic League works to safeguard both the religious freedom rights and the free speech rights of Catholics whenever and wherever they are threatened.

ABOUT THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE

Catholic Ping - Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list

[wideawake]

Next week - a very special Prime Time Live about the curious story of Maria Monk.

[big'ol_freeper]

*sigh*

[Antoninus]

Same stuff, different day.

Next up on Prime Time--"Mohammad: Prophet of Allah, or Whacked-out Pedophile?"

[Jaded]

File it under 'Geeze, Not This ***t Again'. I'll be at a quilt shop spending money.

[Phantom Lord]

With the way the Papacy was handed out in extreme nepotism in the early years of the catholic church, a female pope is a possibility, but very unlikely.

The early history of the papacy is not a pretty thing. From being the controller of great amounts of wealth handed out for favors to holding orgies, its history is not what most would think it is.

[End Times Sentinel]

Alright ABC.  You win.  The whole Jesus thing is a hoax, you've convinced me.  Now I'll sit quietly and watch your Desperate Houswives and whatever other garbage you want to feed me.

I'm just glad you dumped Monday Night Football, so I don't ever have to watch your stupid network again.

Owl_Eagle

"You know, I'm going to start thanking
the woman who cleans the restroom in
the building I work in.  I'm going to start
thinking of her as a human being"

-Hillary Clinton

(Yes, she really said that

Peggy Noonan

The Case Against Hillary Clinton, pg 55)

[exile]

Why is this old legend so hot right now?

[theFIRMbss]

>ABC-TV DISCOVERS “POPE JOAN”

Pope Joan (Diane Sawyer looks at FEMALE POPE)

ABC Pushes Anti-Catholic "Pope Joan" Tale

[Blzbba]

Little Joan was not feelin' well...

She was afraid she might go to hell...

But she never gave up hope...

even when she became the Pope..

Said hey Joan, take a walk on the wild side.

[bnelson44]

Debunked here:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08407a.htm

Scroll down to "fiction 4", here:
http://www.love2learn.net/religion/samples/popefict.htm

I would suggest people complain:
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=131877&page=1

[squibs]

Actually I remember Paul Harvey telling this story when I was young.
There are segments of the old bible that are not allowed
because they refer to this incident.
I grew up believing this for 50 years.
may or may not be true but what an impression it made
in me.

[A.A. Cunningham]

On Thursday evening, instead of watching Sawyer's revisionist garbage, read the work of a fellow freeper.

[Fruit of the Spirit]

ABC did NOT "discover" anything new. The story of Pope Joan was aired on PBS a few years ago.

The Catholic church is purported to have erased any knowledge of Pope Joan from the church records. It is a story now told by the nuns.

A group of licensed genealogists attempted to determine who this "Pope Joan" was...to no avail.

[slowhand520]

The American Spectator had a blurb about this on their blog: http://www.spectator.org/blogger.asp#1293




ABC's Pope Joan - Thursday, December 29, 2005 @ 2:40:39 PM


Those naming the mainstream media as their Enemy of the Year (below) won't be dissuaded after learning about Primetime's segment tonight. Diane Sawyer will "report" (read: speculate) about a Pope Joan, a rumored female pope in the ninth century.

In a Video on Demand preview at the ABC News website, the anchorette asks the segment's producer, Ann Reynolds, what evidence exists of Pope Joan. Reynolds responds, "You're talking about the dark ages. t is almost impossible to prove anything. There's no sense of history as you or I would accept it. There's no sense of proof as a news person would accept it. But it's an amazing mystery." Hmmm... tabloids usually run their gossip yarns with more evidence than that.

But what do historians say? Reynolds answers, "They argue back and forth. There's so little hard evidence that I don't think anybody can say it's true. There are people who can say they believe it because of the preponderance of evidence. But we talked to all sorts of them and they have arguments back and forth."

In an email release, the Catholic League details Diane Sawyer's presentation:

Sawyer tells us that Pope Joan gave birth while processing. Pope Joan, she says, dressed in male garb, but this is not an historical anomaly: Sawyer shows us a picture of a woman dressed as a soldier in the U.S. Civil War and then proclaims, "Which brings us back to Joan." But of course. Another segue could have been little girls dressed up as GI Joe on Halloween, but that might have unsettled the sure-mouthed Sawyer.

Sawyer does not interview either Paul Johnson, the world renowned historian and author of "The Papacy," nor does she interview Eamon Duffy, the brilliant historian from Cambridge and author of the magisterial volume, "Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes." Had she done so they would have laughed in her smug face. So who does she rely on? Donna Cross and Mary Malone. Cross wrote a novel about the mythical Pope Joan and has no standing among scholars. Malone is an ex-nun who lost her faith and hates the Catholic Church. "I can no longer pray," she said in 1996, "because of the language, and because it seemed so essential as the core of the tradition that God be male."

Maybe next week we'll get a segment about mainstream media integrity and how bloggers rely on shoddy sources.

It's a shame the Media Research Center has already compiled its media quotes of the year. Add these to the ballot for 2006.

[N. Theknow]

ABC-TV DISCOVERS “POPE JOAN”

Next they will email all the people on their address books so Bill Gates and AOL will send them millions of dollars, they will get thousands of gift certificates to restaurants and they will have cute little animations pop up on their monitors for every ten emails they send.

The down side is that the United States Post Office will charge them $.05 for every email they send.

[PeterFinn]

In fairness, Catholics could now make a film about jackasses who pose as journalists.

[sgtbono2002]

If you want the straight skinny on Saint Joan, go to Google--type in Catholic Encyclopedia--in the search engine there type in Saint Joan you will get what the Catholics have to say about this.

If you like I will save you time and effort.
1. It was at one time a Rumor
2. It is Bullshiite.

[mc5cents]

Here is a list of the popes. I did not see a "Joan" listed. Lots of Johns. I to XXIII. 266 popes and not a Joan in there. Now somwhere along the line I suppose an 'a' could have slipped in instead of an 'h' but it would have been a slip of the quill. I am sure that the plumbing has been the same in all the popes from Peter to Benedict.

[Mr. Silverback]

They gather around them teachers who will tell them what their itching ears want to hear. The end times continue...