Are Women Female Popes?
All the questions in this paper I once put to an Abbess, who cared more
to make money than saints. Is not the triple crown of the Pope now on
female heads, as a four or five-fold one, and do not their hats shoot
up into the air like lettuce-heads in dog-days?--Is it not well known
to women themselves that they are as infallible as the Pope, and if he,
as the Jansenists believe, is more so in dogmatic than in historical
matters, is not with the female Popes the reverse true? And who has the
courage to contradict one, unless he has married her? The Pope is God's
vicegerent or, in fact, God himself, if Felius[17] is to be credited;
but are not the Papesses notoriously Goddesses? Certainly a Pope,
Clement VI. himself says, that he can command angels to transport any
church out of Purgatory into Heaven[18]; but do our female Popes need
angels for that? They require only a week to cast us into Purgatory,
and only an hour to snatch us out of it into Heaven. Marianus Socinus,
who asserts[19] that a Pope can make something out of nothing, right
out of wrong, and anything under heaven out of anything under heaven,
must simply not think of doubting that our Papesses also have the same
power, and do not their auricular confessions recur to is recollection?
Who excommunicate their heretics or give dispensations to their
faithful oftener. Popes or Papesses? and who, at this day, most serene
Abbess! makes more omnipotent eye-briefs and lip-bulls, who creates
more saints, more blessed ones and more _Nuncios a and de latere_,
Peter's successors or Peter's successoresses? Popes are said formerly
to have given away or taken away kingdoms; what then? Do not Papesses
rule those Kingdoms? Popes could not bestow upon America anything
except a name, but is not that which some Papesses bring us from that
land something much more _real_? Kings who once were tormented by
Popes, are now blessed by Papesses; and if the former at most created a
King or two, are not the Kings under most of the European throne
canopies made by Papesses, and in fact, in neat pocket-form, until they
gradually grow up from the baptismal font to be as tall as I or their
throne? Do we not kiss their slippers oftener than that of the Holy
Father, since their two arms were found by Professor Moskati at Padua
long ago to be two fore-feet, to whose kid or silk shoes (hand-shoes)
we every week press our lips? Do not Pope and Papess lay aside their
old names, when they ascend the throne, which the one claims on the
ground of age, the other on that of youth? And if it were true, that
Pope and Papess were originally only bishops of a Province (a husband)
and that there has never been any other female Pope than the good Joan;
could I venture to say the exact opposite publicly in an extra-leaf or
privately in your ear, most serene Abbess?
_End of the Extra-Leaf_.
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