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irishpatrick
Guest
Ever hear of Pope Sixtus V?While I reject the Pope Joan story as a complete fabrication, your logic falls a bit short. We’ve had some popes that, while male, were absolutely evil men. If God did not act to keep them out of office, why would we expect Him to keep a woman out? I wish He would have but He, in His wisdom and sovereignty, chose not to.
He was Pope in 1590, and to make a much longer story short, he had done a revision the Vulgate himself and planned to promulgate that Bibler version of his own Papal authority. He had even written a Papal Bull for purposes of introducing his revised text. The problem was he had created a great many errors during his own work of revising the text, which means that had he manage to promulgate his text, he would have been formally teaching error.
Just before he was able to promulgate the text, he died in bed. Though determined to see his project to its promulgation, it never happened because he died before he could release his texts to the world. There is nothing in the record that reveals he had any ongoing health problems before he died.
It is a classic case of a Pope who would be formally teaching error from teh Chair of Peter, and yet he left this world before he could. The gates of hades did not overcome the Church, or the Papacy, in that case. Similarily, it is no stretch to believe that God would not allow a women into the Chair of Peter–because the very existence of a female Pope would be an act of formally teaching error.
You make a good point that we have some less than stellar Popes, yet none of them tried to teach error. A woman must lie and deceieve a great many people to rise to the Chair of Peter, and if one were able to do that, then it sets the lie to the Churches teachings about infallibility, and it sets the lie to the Biblical statement that the gates of hades will not prevail (Popes must be Catholic men).