So the author Donna Woolfolk Cross who’s running around shilling her book about the historically elusive Pope Joan says that the Vatican is filled with a bunch of lying liars who lie when they’re pretending to tell the truth or something.

I’m actually not kidding. That’s pretty much her real point as a guest poster on the On Faith blog at the Washington Post.

Years ago, I was invited to a panel discussion about Pope Joan in Vienna, Austria. I read a chapter from my novel, and Peter Stanford, former editor of the Catholic Herald, spoke about the strong evidence in favor of Joan’s historical existence (in which he believes). Afterwards, Peter told me what happened when he met the curator of the Vatican archives. “There’s nothing here about Pope Joan,” the curator told him.

But what if the curator was practicing mental reservation? “There’s nothing here about Pope Joan” he could then say aloud, adding in his own mind, for God’s ears alone, “…nothing that is for you, or that you can see.”

That’s the high point of logic for the piece. Let’s recap. Someone who she knows who believes that what she wrote in a fiction book is actually true went to the Vatican where someone told him that they had nothing about Pope Joan.

AHA! That proves it!

And just when I thought this was the silliest piece…evah… I reread the introduction and if this isn’t the most blatant name drop in history, I don’t know what is. This is the intro graph of the piece:

“Where’s your skepticism?” Diane Sawyer, a brilliant interviewer who pulls no punches, asked me right after we sat down for an ABC Primetime piece on my book, “Pope Joan: A Novel.”

“Where’s yours?” I countered. “The record of the Catholic Church with regard to the truth, both scientific and historical, does not inspire confidence.”

You’d never know that interview took place in 2005. Four years have passed and her intro paragraph is still an interview with Diane Sawyer from four years ago? One has to imagine that the author mentions this every five minutes everywhere she goes.

Mam, you want fries with that?
Oh what a delightful question. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Diane Sawyer, the acclaimed journalist…

I’m sure that when the movie Pope Joan comes out we’ll be seeing a lot more of this author and she’ll have all new cultural references to bore us with like Bill Maher and Larry King.