ody of the late Pope John Paul II
ROME (Reuters)
- Thieves broke into a small church in the mountains east of Rome over
the weekend and stole a reliquary with the blood of the late Pope John
Paul II, a custodian said on Monday.
Dozens of police with sniffer dogs scoured the remote area for clues to
what the Italian Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana called "a
sacrilegious theft that was probably commissioned by someone".
Franca Corrieri told Reuters she had discovered a broken window early
on Sunday morning and had called the police. When they entered the small
stone church they found the gold reliquary and a crucifix missing.
John Paul, who died in 2005, loved the mountains in the Abruzzo region.
He would sometimes slip away from the Vatican secretly to hike or ski
there and pray in the church.
Polish-born John Paul, who reigned for 27 years, is due to be made a
saint of the Roman Catholic Church in May, meaning the relic will become
more noteworthy and valuable.
In 2011, John Paul's former private secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw
Dziwisz, now archbishop of Krakow in Poland, 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.
It was put in a gold and glass circular case and kept in a niche of the
small mountain church of San Pietro della Ienca, near the city of
L'Aquila.
Corrieri, who is
part of an association that looks after the small church, said the
incident felt more like a "kidnapping" than a theft. "In a sense, a
person has been stolen," she said by telephone.
She said she could not say if the intention of the thieves may have been to seek a ransom for the blood.
Apart from the reliquary and a crucifix, nothing else was stolen from
the isolated church, even though Corrieri said the thieves would
probably have had time to take other objects during the night-time
theft.
Some of John Paul's
blood was saved after an assassination attempt that nearly killed him in
St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981.
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