On a Legendary Pope

The history of the Catholic Church for the past 1700 years is filled with stories of legendary/mystical/mythical people. This is one such legend.

Possibly.

I say “possibly” because there was a time in the history of the Church when not only were records scant and/or lost, but also a time when so much turmoil and change was happening in many different places that it is almost impossible to tell for certain who was who and what was what. And that brings us to the story of a pope, Pope John Angelicus. Pope John is supposed to have been the pontiff for only two years, from 855 to 857.

What makes his papacy questionable and likely the stuff of legend is that he wasn’t mentioned in many lists of popes of the Church for at least 350 years after he was supposed to have been made pope. The first time anyone included this Pope John on the list of church leaders is when a Frenchman, one Jean deMailley, commented on the short reign over the church by John. Within 100 years, other Church chroniclers included John Angelicus in their lists based largely on deMailley’s list.

The story goes that John came from the city of Mainz, and, as a teen, joined a monastery to follow a lover who also joined. Well, right away, we can see how some people then (and now, sadly) would object to such a narrative. John’s story was then considered to be true and history until the 1600s. At the same time, the Protestant Reformation was causing many across Europe to question the Catholic Church and its (often sketch) history. That’s when the Church began looking closely at anything that could be pointed to by Protestants as being false or fabricated by the Church, whether it be in the realm of theology or even the history of the popes.

And that brings us back to John Angelicus. The Church formally renounced the existence of John’s rule, thereby taking away one small but still significant bullet point that the Protestant movement could have used. The official Catholic line became that the list of popes moved from Pope Leo IV’s death in 855 to Benedict III receiving the keys to the papal kingdom that same summer of 855. That effectively closed out any possibility of another pontiff in between.

Of course, it could be that the Church also wanted to cover up who John Angelicus really was. That might have been the reason deMailley included his detailed description of John’s reign in the first place. You see, the reason that the story said John followed a lover into the monastery was that he was not “John” at all.

No, it seems that the legend is that John Angelicus was actually a woman, Joan Angelicus, who hid her gender and rose through the Church hierarchy to become the pope.

On a Heresy

The issue with using religion as a base to write and enforce laws is that religion is man-made and subjective. Your religious beliefs, even if they are different from mine, are no more or less right or good. And the same is true for my religious beliefs. Two people can look at the same thing or idea or work of “scripture,” express our individual interpretations about it, and suddenly my orthodoxy becomes your heresy. And so laws based on these opinions–and that’s all that they are–are not only wrong on their faces, but they also go against basic human freedoms of liberty, justice, and equality (none of which are so-called Biblical principles, by the way).

And all of that that takes us to a case of heresy that was brought against a man in the 17th Century. At this time in what is now Italy, the Catholic Church held political as well as religious power. They prosecuted and persecuted people who did not follow the letter of the Catholic ordinances and beliefs to their interpretation of religious perfection. In this particular situation, a man simply did not agree with the church that the earth was the center of the universe, that all objects circled around our globe.

Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer and thinker, had posited a different idea, that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the Catholic model of the opposite. Now, Copernicus wasn’t the first to hold this belief; Greek astronomers and others had made the same claims centuries earlier including the concept that the earth rotated on its axis. Islamic astronomers confirmed these Greek ideas. However, it was the Copernicus proposal that this man had espoused, and it’s what the Catholic church prosecuted him for. One major reason for their prosecution at this time was because Copernicus had published his findings a century before; he drew the known planets in correct order radiating out from the heliocentric system. Many people began listening to the theory, and the Catholic Church saw this as a threat to their ways of belief and their control over what people believed.

So, they put this poor man on trial for agreeing with Copernicus. During his cross examination by the Church’s prosecutor, the man walked back his belief out of a sense that he knew the punishment for his “crime” could be severe. He said that, after careful consideration, that rather than a “belief” in the heliocentric idea, he wanted merely to use that concept as merely a starting point for scientific discussion.

We must remember that this period saw the Catholic Church under attack from the surging Protestant movement. Printing presses published ideas that countered the Church. The Renaissance and the early beginnings of the Age of Enlightenment further challenged the orthodox and monolithic Catholic faith and power. That is why trials such as this one, while seemingly over a trivial matter, were so important to the Catholic hierarchy. While this doesn’t excuse the severe abuses the Catholic Church committed during this period of the rise of heterodoxy in Europe, it does help to explain it. Sadly, similar behavior is occurring across the globe as extremists in all nations are demanding that laws be passed that match their beliefs and not that protect basic freedom of thought and belief.

The argument of the man that he didn’t actually believe Copernicus but only wanted to use his ideas as discussion points did not sway the Catholic court. They found him guilty of crimes against the Church and against God. His sentence was to be under house arrest for the remainder of his life. And that’s what happened to him.

It would take the Catholic Church 300 years before it admitted it was wrong and exonerated Galileo for his “crime.”

On a Former Nun

We aren’t sure about Katharina von Bora’s origins, and that includes who her parents were exactly. Best historians can tell, she was born in Germany about 1499. What can be shown beyond doubt is that her father (again, whoever he was) ordered his then nine-year-old daughter to be placed in a convent in Grimma, a town not too far from Leipzig.

Two things to note here. First, do you see that “von” in her name above? That means that her family was probably land-owning and had some money; they had enough money to pay a convent to take her in . The second thing to note is that convents, monasteries, and churches did a good job in the 16th Century of taking copious notes and keeping extensive records. That’s how we know what happened to Katharina beginning at that point in her life. Lucky for Katharina, one of her aunts was already at the convent as a nun.

The first half of the 16th Century in what is now Germany was filled with revolutionary thought and action in not only politics but also in religion. The young nun felt deeply in her heart that the traditions she’d been raised in her entire life and had been trained in at the nunnery and what the Bible was teaching about the concepts of salvation and grace did not match. She secretly joined the new Lutheran reform movement while still in the convent. Soon, Katharina and some of her religious sisters in the nunnery decided that they would renounce their holy orders and leave the convent. The small group contacted Martin Luther directly and asked him for advice and help.

The great religious reformer agreed to help, and he had operatives smuggle the women out of the convent in a fish wagon on the Saturday evening before Easter Sunday, 1523. Katharina and her friends were first hidden by Luther as he asked their respective families to take them back in. Almost all families refused. They either were angry that their daughters supported the Protestant Reform movement or they feared for their souls and also their lives if they were deemed to have offered support for Luther.

So, Luther did the next best thing. He found jobs, homes or husbands for the women so that they didn’t have to return to their homes. But, sadly, he could not find a placement for Katharina. We don’t know why for sure. Perhaps her family’s connections made her too prominent of a name for anyone to marry, help, or offer employment to her. And it wasn’t that the 25 year old woman didn’t want to marry. There was a man, albeit an older man, she had her eye on for some time. He was 41. And he, too, had been a member of a religious order. And, like Katharina, he, too, had left the service of the Catholic Church to join the reform movement.

However, he was somewhat reluctant to marry even though he was no longer a monk. Since he had become a protestant minister, he felt that his work was important, and he told her that God would have to come first. Katharina was fine with that. The pair married, and they moved into a former monastery that had been turned into a place of study and retreat for people trying to leave the Catholic Church.

Immediately after their marriage, Katharina assumed the role of managing the monastery’s resources and finances. She managed the land as well as bred and sold the livestock in order to make ends meet. She also ran the brewery. In a time when clean drinking water was scarce and food wasn’t always readily available, beer provided filling and nutritious drink for people. The former monastery housed many visitors and students, also. Later, Katharina ran a hospital there. Her husband referred to her lovingly as “The Boss,” while she always referred to him as, “Sir.” The former nun turned wife developed a well-founded reputation for hard work as well as a love for ministry.

She and her husband had 6 kids, and they also raised four orphans as their own at the monastery. He passed away after 21 years of married life, and Katharina was forced to move from the house where her family had been raised because of a pandemic and a war. She was injured in an accident in an oxcart and died at age 53 on December 20, 1552. That became her commemoration day in some Lutheran Churches even in modern times.

Her epitaph reads, “Here, fallen asleep in Christ, lies Martin Luther’s wife, Katharina.”