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.