A woman as pope and Jesuit

When, during his encounter with the youth at the University of Santo Tomas, Pope Francis advised the organizers to include more women next time, to offset the program dominated by men, I remembered John Paul II at Mass in Luneta who brought cheer to women when he changed the standard invitation to prayer or exhortation, “Brothers and sisters in Christ,” to “Sisters and brothers…” While we know that the ordination of women in the Catholic Church are light years away, comment on this issue during the papal coverage should have been made over the cold malunggay soup served the Pope in Tacloban.

There are many women today, including Sen. Miriam Santiago, holding more advanced theology degrees than men, but they cannot be ordained because of their gender. While some countries have been governed by women, the Vatican is reserved for men.

But there is a persistent legend about a woman who became Pope Joan. Before the 16th century, it was generally believed that a certain Joan or Joanna was elected pope in the 9th, 10th, or 11th century, depending on which source you are reading. A critic of the papacy, John Hus, used the story of Pope Joan against the Council of Constance in 1415 and was not contradicted. Petrarch and Boccacio picked up the story of Pope Joan, claiming that Pope Leo IV (who died in 855 AD), or Pope Victor III (who died 1087 AD), was succeeded by one Pope Joan Anglicus. This “popessa” also appears under other names: Agnes, Gilberta, or Jutta. In some accounts, she remains nameless.

Allegedly educated in Athens, she traveled to Rome via Mainz dressed as a man. She impressed people in the Vatican with her learning and was invited to stay as a notary in the Curia where she rose to the rank of cardinal and was eventually elected pope. She reigned for two years, seven months and four days before she was exposed, according to Dominican accounts, during a procession from St. Peter’s to the Lateran. That morning, while passing one of the narrow streets between the Colosseum and Sant Clemente, she alighted from her horse and walked on foot a bit. When she remounted the horse, she delivered a baby! Everyone was surprised, then furious; a mob tied her to the tail of the horse, had her dragged around the city, and stoned her to death outside the walls of Rome.

Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, together with other 16th-century scholars, questioned the existence of this popessa and, after some research, found no contemporary evidence about any pope named Joan in any of the periods given as her reign. However, some people refuse to believe the historians and insist that the physical examination of a pope-elect is undertaken to determine his true gender.

While there was no female pope, history does record the existence of a woman Jesuit. While the constitution of the Society of Jesus specifically forbids its members to work regularly with women, and provides against the establishment of a women’s branch of the order, and regular spiritual direction of women, there was one woman, Isabel Roser, who would not take no for an answer. Roser was a childless, wealthy Catalan who was the benefactress of Ignatius Loyola. When she was widowed in 1541 she followed Ignatius to Rome and pestered him to accept her vows as a Jesuit. After two years of vain pleading, she went to Pope Paul III (the same pope who approved the founding of the Society of Jesus), who invoked the obedience of Ignatius and ordered him to accept Roser’s vows.

On Christmas Day 1545, Isabel Roser, her lady-in-waiting Francisca Cruyllas, and her friend Lucrezia di Bradine took their especially formulated vows of poverty, chastity and obedience before Ignatius. Unfortunately, Roser turned out to be a cross too heavy for Ignatius to bear, and two of her nephews, disinherited by her donation of her estate to the Society, sued in a church court claiming that the Jesuits had stolen her fortune. To cut a long story short, in November 1546, less than a year since the three women took their vows, Pope Paul III transferred their vows to a diocesan bishop. In May 1547, Ignatius asked the Pope to release him and the order from the care of women in organized communities, and the Pope obliged with the 1549 document Licet debitum. Roser returned to Barcelona where she continued to do good works. She later entered a Franciscan convent in Jerusalem where she lived until her death.

What is not so well known is that there was another woman who took her vows as a Jesuit and died as a Jesuit: Juana de Austria, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (who is also Carlos I of Spain and known to most Filipinos today as a brandy trademark) and Isabel of Portugal. As mother of the King of Portugal and Queen Regent of Spain, for her brother Philip II, hers was a case hard to refuse. Widowed, she lived a monastic life and even took vows as a Franciscan, but later chose to become a Jesuit.

Juana de Austria was admitted to the Society with the vows of a scholastic, a form devised by Ignatius, that bound the princess but reserved to the Society the right to release her from vows. All this was kept secret, and she corresponded with the Society hidden under the name, Mateo Sanchez. While she was not a fully professed Jesuit, she was a secret Jesuit from 1554 to her death in 1573. Church his-story, when made into her-story, can be a lot stranger than fiction.

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