Pope Joan_ A Novel - Donna Woolfolk Cross [188]
Joan smiled as she saw his mind already beginning to engage with the idea, anticipating the problems involved.
“If anyone can do it, you can.”
“Are you sure this is what you want?” Gerold’s eyes met hers in a look of unmistakable longing.
She felt herself respond to him. But she dared not let her feelings show. To acknowledge their intimacy, even here in private, would be to court disaster. Matter-of-factly she replied, “I can think of nothing that would be of greater benefit to the people.”
He looked away. “Very well, then. Mind you, I’m not promising anything. I’ll look into it, see what’s possible. I’ll do all I can to see the aqueduct restored to working order.”
“That’s all I ask,” she said.
SHE was coming to understand in an altogether new way what it meant to be Pope. Though nominally a position of great power, it was actually one of great obligation. Her time was completely taken up with the burdensome round of liturgical duties. On Palm Sunday, she blessed and distributed palm branches in front of St. Peter’s. On Holy Thursday, she washed the feet of the poor and served a meal to them with her own hands. On the Feast of St. Anthony she stood before the Cathedral of Sancta Maria Maggiore and sprinkled holy water on the oxen, horses, and mules that had been brought by their owners to be blessed. On the third Sunday after Advent, she laid her hands upon each of the candidates brought forward to be ordained as priests, deacons, or bishops.
There was also the daily mass to lead. On certain days, this became a stational mass, preceded by a procession through the city to the titular church in which the service would be held, stopping along the route to hear petitioners; the procession and service took most of the day. There were over ninety stational masses, including the Marian feasts, the ember days, Christ Mass, Septuagesima and Sexagesima Sundays, and most of the Sundays and ferias in Lent.
There were feast days honoring Saints Peter, Paul, Lawrence, Agnes, John, Thomas, Luke, Andrew, and Anthony, as well as the Nativity, the Annunciation, and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. These were fixed or immovable feasts, meaning that they fell on the same day each year, like Christ Mass and Epiphany. Oblation, the Feast of St. Peter’s Chair, the Circumcision of Christ, the Nativity of John the Baptist, Michaelmas, All Saints’, and the Exaltation of the Cross were also fixed feasts. Easter, the holiest day of the Christian year, was a movable feast; its place in the calendar followed the time of the ecclesiastical full moon, as did its “satellite” holidays, Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Ascension Day, and Pentecost.
Each of these Christian holidays was observed with at least four days of celebration: the vigil, or eve of the feast; the feast itself; the morrow, or day following; and the octave, or eighth day subsequent. All told, there were over one hundred and seventy-five Christian festival days, given over to elaborate and time-consuming ceremonial.
All of this gave Joan very little time to actually govern, or do the things she deeply cared about: bettering the lot of the poor and improving the education of the clergy.
IN AUGUST, the arduous liturgical routine was interrupted by a synod. Sixty-seven prelates attended, including all the suburbicarii, or provincial bishops, as well as four Frankish bishops sent by the Emperor Lothar.
Two of the issues addressed at this synod held particular interest for Joan. The first was intinction, the practice of bestowing Communion by dipping the eucharistic bread into the wine, rather than partaking of them separately. In the twenty years since Joan had introduced the idea at Fulda as a way of preventing the spread of disease, it had become so popular that in Frankland it was now almost universal custom. The Roman clergy, who were of course unaware of Joan’s connection with intinction, regarded the novel practice with suspicion.
“It is a transgression of divine law,” the