Jeopardy Question Last Night: "Who is Pope Joan?"
Pope Joan (Diane Sawyer looks at FEMALE POPE)
ABC-TV DISCOVERS “POPE JOAN”
ABC's Bogus "Pope Joan" Story Also Hocked Debunked "Rule of Thumb" Myth
The Fable of “Pope Joan” [Debunks Diane Sawyer on ABC]
Indeed. But all five that you cite are in response to then-ongoing discussions on television about this issue (a Jeopardy question and a Diane Sawyer TV program), and all of them have as their object the direct rebuttal of the myth of Pope Joan. It is for those reasons that all of these threads were posted by Catholics. Are you implying that those Catholic posters were trivially “perpetuating” this issue on FR? I would say that they were merely refuting it.
Does your posting of a 7 year-old article have the same aim of refuting a currently ongoing discussion in the MSM? If not, then why bring it up afresh now? Since the massively overwhelming opinion of historians is that the story is bogus and leads to nothing good, one can only wonder what prompts this article’s presence here. While the article does, in fact, get around to citing the usual denials of authenticity for the legend, its first third is murky enough to plant a seed of doubt on the scholars’ findings. Is that, in fact, the goal of of posting such sensationalist nonsense now?