[Apologetics] Revealed: Pope John Paul II was stabbed in 1982

[Stephen Korsman]

Revealed: Pope John Paul II was stabbed in
1982<http://www.americanpapist.com/2008/10/revealed-pope-john-paul-ii-was-stabbed.html>
via American Papist: Not Your Average
Catholic!<http://www.americanpapist.com/blog.html>by Thomas Peters on
10/15/08

A revelation in a new documentary film which includes interviews with the
late Pontiff's secretary Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz:

The late Pope John Paul was wounded by a knife-wielding priest in 1982, a
year after he was shot in St Peter's Square, but the injury was kept secret,
his former top aide says in a documentary film.

On May 12, 1982, the pope was visiting the shrine city of Fatima in Portugal
to give thanks for surviving a first assassination attempt a year earlier on
May 13, 1981, when he was shot in St Peter's Square by Turkish gunman Mehmet
Ali Agca.

A crazed ultra-conservative Spanish priest, Juan Fernandez Krohn, lunged at
the pope with a dagger and was knocked to the ground by police and arrested.
The fact that the knife actually reached the pope and cut him was not known
until now.

"I can now reveal that the Holy Father was wounded. When we got back to the
room (in the Fatima sanctuary complex) there was blood," Dziwisz says in the
documentary.

The pope carried on with the trip without disclosing his wound.

Krohn was arrested and served several years in a Portuguese prison before
being expelled from the country.
(Reuters<http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081015/people_nm/us_vatican_film_johnpaul>
)

This story is a good reminder that we should pray for the safety of Pope
Benedict, and be thankful for the many times dangers to their person have
been narrowly averted in the past.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gathman.org/pipermail/apologetics/attachments/20081015/d26371fe/attachment.html>