A group of thieves broke into a church in the mountains, east
of Rome over the weekend and stole a vial filled with the blood of late
Pope John Paul II.Some of John Paul’s blood was said to have been saved after an assassination attempt that nearly killed him in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981.
Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005, loved the mountains in the Abruzzo region east of Rome and sometimes slip away from the Vatican secretly to hike or ski there and pray in the church and in 2011, John Paul’s former private secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, gave the local Abruzzo community some of the late pontiff’s blood as a token of the love he had felt for the mountainous area. The blood was set in a gold and glass circular case and kept in kept in a niche of the small mountain church of San Pietro della Ienca, near the city of L’Aquila.
A custodian of the church, Franca Corrieri, said she had discovered a broken window on Sunday morning and alerted authorities, adding that when they entered the small stone church they found the gold reliquary and a crucifix missing.
Corrieri said the incident felt more like a “kidnapping’’ than a theft as she could not say if the intention of the thieves may have been to seek a ransom for the blood.
She said apart from the reliquary and a crucifix, nothing else was stolen from the isolated church, even though the thieves would probably have had time to take other objects during the night-time theft.
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