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Comment by Meneth | Hacker News Reader

No one can apply to be pope of the catholic church.

Technically, all adult Catholics can become Pope. But realistically it's just one of the cardinals, which means you need to become a bishop first, which means you need to become a priest first, which means you need to be celibate (x). This guy has a wife, according to the article, so he cannot become a Pope.

(x) this is technically not true for some Anglican orders that later became Catholics? Maybe? (I never remember the rules of the ordinariate.) So maybe he could first become a priest in Anglican Church, then switch to Catholicism, then become a bishop, then a Cardinal, then a Pope? It's a long shot though.

edit: ahhh the married priests in Ordinariate cannot become bishops. So he would need to have first his marriage annulled I guess.

Adult male Catholics, surely?

... Maybe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Joan

(She probably didn't actually exist, but it's interesting that until quite recently she was generally believed to have existed.)

What do you mean? Catcholic Church has records, did they just came up with something about a nonexistent Pope Joan out of thin air? How could they...

Catholic Church's records on early popes are often surprisingly bad, particularly in antipope-heavy eras. There are a _number_ of popes where the detail is pretty vague. Use of damnatio memoriae also confuses the issue, eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Formosus#Legacy

eh not really, we NOW have quite good records on most popes except for the first few ones that we get just in a list from St Irenaeus (for example from St Linus - the guy immediately after St Peter - we get almost nothing)

but about the middle age popes we know quite a lot NOW. But it used to be different.

Yes, that was satire, in Latin, John is spelled Joannes, or Joan for short.

While this is for practical purposes true _now_, there actually were a small number of married popes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#...), and there have been a few popes who were not priests before being elected (if you want to be pedantic, Peter wasn't a priest, and may have been married, but there were later examples).

> all adult Catholics can become Pope

All adult male Catholics, though also see Pope Joan (probably didn't actually exist, but was generally believed to have existed until quite recently). There's also no actual age requirement, though in practice the youngest pope was _probably_ 18.

Correct. In fact, even to be a bishop you have to state as part of the ritual that you do not wish to be a bishop. (Many do of course.)

(Am off to read the article now. :) )

Sure, anyone and everyone can apply, to basically anything. Sometimes you can even get into stuff they didn't think they accepted applicants to. Most of the times you get ignored though.

Not the point of the story at all. Read before commenting.

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