Free All the Pope's Men by Jr. John L. Allen Page B

nothing, since the process from start to finish is under tight Vatican control. The Synod Secretariat sets the agenda and prepares the working documents, and papal appointees determine what ideas survive in the propositions. In the end, the synod’s conclusions are up to the Pope anyway. This reality has led to a sort of cynicism. For example, most days John Paul sat in front of the synod hall and was often seen praying his breviary, the book that contains the daily prayers of the Church. An old joke, however, has it that the Pope was not really reading the breviary, but the synod’s conclusions while the event was still going on!
    In the end, however, this may be a case of whether the glass is half-empty or half-full. It’s true that synods do not produce the immediate, decisive action that many Catholics would like to see. But the Catholic Church, with its two-thousand-year history and 1-billion-strong global membership, is not designed to turn on a dime. It needs time for ideas to mature and for a wide base of support to build in order to accommodate change without rupturing communion. What the synod perhaps provides is a chance for ideas to get a first hearing, to be injected into the Catholic bloodstream in order to see how the body reacts. During those eight-minute speeches in the first week, participants have the liberty to raise whatever concerns they like, and the world’s press is listening. The Asian bishops did just this in 1997, making a case for inculturation and an approach to “mission" based on dialogue and witness. At the most recent synod, more than fifty speakers raised the need for greater collegiality in the Church, despite specific instructions to avoid the topic. It was an unmistakable signal that this issue is “on the table" and will have to be confronted, even if the synod itself brought no closure. One could argue that the synod offers a valuable sounding board for the Church, even if its bark is, at present, worse than its bite.

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    TOP FIVE MYTHS ABOUT THE VATICAN
    Pilgrims who arrived at the famed cathedral in Siena, Italy, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would have come across a series of busts of popes, including one bearing a rather remarkable inscription: “John VIII, a woman from England." The statue, placed in the cathedral around 1400, reflects the widely held conviction in Europe for more than three hundred years that a woman had once been Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. She was known as “Pope Joan," and there are more than five hundred textual references to her story during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Even today some Catholic feminists take Pope Joan as a point of reference, even while, in most cases, recognizing that she’s fable rather than fact.
    Although there are different versions of the Pope Joan legend, the most common form goes like this. In the ninth century, a woman of English origin, but born in the German city of Mainz, begins to dress like a man and heads off to Athens, where she becomes a learned theologian. Later she moves to Rome, still dressed like a male, now in clerical garb. She begins to ascend the career ladder in the Curia, gaining a reputation for learning and virtue. Upon the death of Pope Leo IV in 855, she is elected Pope and takes the name of John. She rules for two and a half years before her secret is discovered, in the most shocking fashion possible. She becomes pregnant and gives birth to a child in the middle of a papal procession from St. Peter’s Basilica to St. John Lateran. (The site is usually thought to have been between the Colosseum and the Church of St. Clement.) Some versions of the story say she was immediately stoned to death, others that she went into exile. Those who believe she survived often added that her child grew up to be the Bishop of Ostia.
    Despite a complete lack of historical plausibility, Renaissance writers such as Boccaccio and Belli regarded the Pope Joan story as literally true. The