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It could have been for just this occasion that I set "adult content" on a couple of days ago. (You probably saw the warning when you accessed this page.)
    The occasion is my sharing with you a marginally scatological snippet from a July 10 New York Times book review (Bill Keller's review, "Sacred and Profane," of Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy, by John Julius Norwich, illustrated, 512 pp., Random House, $30).

Did you know that one of the 265 popes (so far) was a woman? I didn't either.

Pope Joan, the mid-ninth-century Englishwoman, disguised herself as a man, became pope, and was caught only when she gave birth....The church, determined not to be fooled again, required subsequent papal candidates to sit on a chaise percée (pierced chair) and [here's the adult-content part] be groped from below by a junior cleric, who would shout to the multitude, "He has testicles!" Norwich tracks down just a piece of furniture in the Vatican Museum.

I think this is a picture of it (it certainly looks papal):

    You may have seen one in your grandmother's outhouse:

    Or when you were in the hospital:

The French seem particularly taken by the story of "La PAPESSE JEANNE."
    There's an article in Wikipedia, according to which the female pope may be "legendary" and may only "supposedly [have] reigned for a few years some time in the Middle Ages."
    The Catholic Guide provides several versions of the story.
    And the most recent movie version even has a Facebook page (so, of course, there's an entry in the Internet Movie Database).
    The movie's now on my Netflix "saved" DVD queue, although I don't have high hopes for it. (I wonder whether it has a scene in which the midwife says, "Hey, the Pope doesn't have testicles!")