Thursday, October 16, 2008

Juan Fernandez Krohn: 1982 Secret Pope Stabber


The late Pope John Paul II 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. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz also disclosed that when John Paul was unable to pronounce words several days before his death in 2005, he told his aides that if he could not speak any more the time had come for him to die.



Dziwisz, who is now cardinal of Krakow, Poland, was John Paul's private secretary and closest aide for nearly 40 years, including all of his 27 years as pontiff. 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.


Crazed Spanish priest
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. - msnbc



Juan María Fernández y Krohn


On May 12, 1982, he wounded Pope John Paul II with a bayonet[3] in Fatima, Portugal; during his trial, he claimed that he was opposed to the reforms of Vatican II and that he believed Pope John Paul II had been in league with the Soviet Union and even was a secret Communist agent trying to corrupt the Vatican. He received a six-year sentence though he served only three years[4] and then was expelled from Portugal, after which he moved to Belgium. By then, he had already completely given up the Roman Catholic priesthood. In Belgium he became a respected but controversial lawyer known for his violent acts in the court rooms. During the beginning of his career as a lawyer, he was accused of slapping judge and Cassation president mr. Erik Carre into the face with his flat hand. - wiki



3 comments:

Footb said...

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz was the best friend JPII

Footb said...

JPII was the most famous Pole and pulled them from communism

Footb said...

This was a great man