Revealed: Pope John Paul Wounded by Priest in 1982
October 15, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
The 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, co-produced by a Polish newspaper.
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz (in the centre of the photo), who is now cardinal of Cracow, Poland, was John Paul’s private secretary and closest aide for nearly 40 years, including all of his 27 years as pontiff.
The documentary, called “Testimony“, or ”A Life With Karol”, is a film version of a memoir released in 2007 under the same title. The movie was co-produced by a Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
As forum4editors.com informed earlier, the movie will make its official premiere at the Vatican on Thursday night (October 16) in the presence of Pope Benedict XVI. The next day, Oct. 17, the movie will hit theatres in John Paul II’s homeland.
“It was my duty toward John Paul. I had to pay back his goodness, which put up with me for 39 years,” Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz told a Vatican press conference introducing the movie on Wednesday, Oct. 15 (see the photo above: Dziwisz is in the centre, on his right hand sits a film producer Przemyslaw Hauser, on his left hand – Vatican’s spokesman Federico Lombardi).
Assasination attempt that the Pope kept in secret
In the movie Cardinal Dziwisz discloses for the first time new facts about the second assasination attempt.
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, according to Reuters (via ABC News).
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.
Basic facts about the new documentary
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz’s tale is set against never-before-published documentary materials and photographs from the Vatican’s archives and private collections.
These are supplemented by poignantly re-enacted scenes featuring original objects used daily by Karol Wojtyla, such as a portable altar which always accompanied him during tourist excursions when he was a bishop; his own liturgical vessels, cassock and belt.
The makers of the movie who worked at his house in Wadowice, in which the future pope had been raised, had an impression they were dealing with real relics, according to the official movie’s website.
All elements of the movie are brought together by the narrator, the British actor Michael York (Cabaret, The Three Musketeers, Jesus of Nazareth).
Work on the movie lasted almost one year, and shooting began in autumn 2007. The film was shot on location in Vatican City, Cracow, and Wadowice. The dramatised reconstructions of landmark events from the life of Karol Wojty?a were shot on locations across Europe.
The music that opens and closes the film is composed by the internationally renowned composer and Academy Award-winner, Vangelis (Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner, 1492: Conquest of Paradise). The remaining original score of Testimony has been composed by Polish musician, Robert Janson.
The movie has been produced by TBA Group in association with Vatican’s publishing house Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Poland’s Agora (publisher of Gazeta Wyborcza), NewCast/ZenithOptimedia Group and Network Production.
“The movie is meant to be a bridge which unites the testimony of Cardinal Dziwisz to the context of the man who became pope,” said producer Przemyslaw Hauser during a press conference in Vatican.
Catholics still waiting for a saint
Cardinal Dziwisz told reporters that he prayed the pope would be made a saint in his lifetime.
“This is our great desire, and for that we pray and we hope it will happen during our lifetime,” he said, but added: “Canonization doesn’t create a saint, it is only recognition” that he is a saint”.
Msgr. Slawomir Oder, the priest in charge of promoting Pope John Paul’s cause, told reporters in Rome Oct. 13 that the cause was proceeding “with seriousness and rigor.”
He said Pope Benedict XVI told him many times to “do it quickly, but well, without irregularities.”
Further information about a movie
- Browse the official website of the movie ”Testimony” (in English).
- Learn more about the movie’s creators and read interviews with them (in English).
- Look at the photos gallery from the shooting ground.
- Watch a trailer of the movie (in Polish):
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