A blade on the basilica steps: John Paul II at Fátima, 12 May 1982

It was about 10.40 on the night of Wednesday 12 May 1982. John Paul II was climbing the steps of the basilica at the Fátima sanctuary after the evening vigil, with the square below him full of pilgrims holding candles. A man in a cassock pushed through the crowd, jumped the security barriers and ran at him, claiming that he only wanted to kiss the Pope.3 sources3 sources

Manuel Cardoso Ramalhete, the officer of the PSP (Public Security Police) in charge of the Pope's personal protection at Fátima and Coimbra, saw his “aggressive and nervous expression” and stopped him, and the Pope's bodyguards threw him to the ground. The man had carried a blade 37 centimetres long in his leather briefcase. News reports at the time called it a bayonet; the book João Paulo II – Peregrino de Fátima and Observador call it a sharpened sabre.5 sources5 sources

Few in the crowd understood what had happened. The Pope was told that a priest had been taken ill, and he came back down the steps to bless him. Over the loudspeakers the rector of the sanctuary explained that the Holy Father had gone to see a priest who had fallen on the stairs and would return to the altar. As John Paul II raised his hand a second time, the man on the ground shouted at him.1 source1 source

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, then a 33-year-old secretary of state in the government and later President of the Republic, was among the Catholic ministers watching from the colonnade. He saw nothing. “It escaped me,” he told Observador in 2024. Like most people there, he learned only the next day that the Pope had survived a second attempt on his life, a year after the first.1 source1 source

At 5.19 pm on Wednesday 13 May 1981, John Paul II was riding in an open vehicle through the crowd at his weekly general audience in St Peter's Square. He had just handed a little girl back to her parents when shots rang out. He collapsed, hit in the abdomen, and was rushed to the Gemelli hospital, where for days his life was in danger. The gunman, Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turk linked to the far-right Grey Wolves, was arrested on the spot.2 sources2 sources

Four days later, reciting the Regina Caeli prayer from his hospital room, the Pope forgave “the brother who struck me”. Ağca's motives have never been settled. He gave so many contradictory explanations that theories about the Soviet KGB, an internal conspiracy and even Ayatollah Khomeini have all had their supporters.2 sources2 sources

The date mattered to him. On 13 May 1917, three shepherd children at the Cova da Iria, near Fátima, had reported the first of the apparitions that made the village one of the great Catholic shrines (the story of October 1917 is told in a separate article). John Paul II came to believe that “a mother's hand” had guided the bullet's path and stopped him at the threshold of death.2 sources2 sources

From his sickbed he asked to see the third part of the “secret” that Lúcia dos Santos, the last surviving seer, had written down in 1944 and sealed. On 18 July 1981 the envelopes were brought from the archives of the Holy Office, the Vatican's doctrinal office; they went back on 11 August. The text describes a “bishop dressed in white” killed by soldiers on a mountain. The Vatican did not publish it until 2000, and in 1982 its contents were the subject of fevered speculation.2 sources2 sources

The papal plane landed at Lisbon's Portela airport at about lunchtime on 12 May. John Paul II kissed the ground and told President Eanes why he had come. His journey had “one dominant meaning: Fátima”, and he carried in his heart Mary's song of thanksgiving “for God having saved my life” in the attack of the year before.3 sources3 sources

He spent the afternoon in Lisbon. He received the members of the government at the Apostolic Nunciature, met lay Catholics in the cathedral and the Franciscans at the church of Santo António, then went on to Fátima, arriving late in the afternoon. In the evening he presided over the prayer vigil at the Chapel of the Apparitions, whose new porch was opened for the visit, and spoke to the pilgrims about why he was there.4 sources4 sources

Nobody counted the crowd. Observador puts it at perhaps a million people. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa remembers a sanctuary packed to its far end, and the streets around it full, at a time when security “was not what it is today”. During the same visit Lúcia, by then a Carmelite nun in Coimbra, met the Polish Pope for the first time.3 sources3 sources

Juan Fernández Krohn was born in Madrid in 1948 or 1949, into a devout family under Franco's dictatorship, and grew up on stories of the “reds” of the Civil War. After studying economics he drifted towards traditionalist circles. In the mid-1970s (1974 or 1975, depending on the account) he joined the Society of St Pius X at Écône, in Switzerland.2 sources2 sources

The Society's founder, the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s gathering of the world's bishops that ended the all-Latin Mass and opened the Church to dialogue with other religions, and had been suspended by Paul VI. Lefebvre ordained Krohn in 1978.2 sources2 sources

He went further than his teacher. According to the Society itself, it expelled him in 1979 for signs of instability and for saying that Lefebvre was too soft on the Pope and the council. He moved towards sedevacantist groups, who hold that the popes since the council are not legitimate. In his eyes John Paul II, a Pole celebrated in the West as an enemy of communism, was a Marxist infiltrator and an Antichrist; the Pope's 1981 encyclical on human work, Laborem Exercens, shocked him in particular.2 sources2 sources

Fátima gave his theory its focus. Among ultra-conservatives it was widely believed that the unpublished third secret condemned the council's reforms, and Krohn was sure the Pope was hiding it for that reason. He told investigators that he had been inspired by the murder of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, that he wanted to save the Church from “demolition” and to become a martyr, and that he acted “in legitimate defence of the Church”.2 sources2 sources

He arrived at Lisbon's Santa Apolónia station on the train from Paris, where he lived, early on 12 May, a few hours before the papal plane. He had no suitcase and no hotel. In a small brown briefcase he carried the blade, chosen to recall the lance that pierced Christ on the cross, and messages to the Pope written in blue marker. He had spent six months planning and expected to be shot by the police.1 source1 source

At the time, the official answer was no. The Vatican insisted that the Pope had not been touched, although Portuguese television pictures suggested otherwise. Dennis Redmont, who covered papal journeys for the Associated Press, recalls confronting the bishop's aide with the footage and being told not to believe everything he saw on video. The next morning the Pope looked shaken, but he kept to his programme.1 source1 source

On 13 May he said Mass in the sanctuary and explained, again, why he was there: on the same day a year before, in St Peter's Square, the attempt on his life had “mysteriously coincided” with the anniversary of the first apparition, and he had taken it as a special call to come. He then entrusted the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, repeating an act of entrustment of 7 June 1981 that he had been too ill to attend in person.3 sources3 sources

For two more days he travelled the country, from Vila Viçosa to Coimbra, Braga and Porto, and said goodbye to Portugal in Porto on 15 May.2 sources2 sources

Twenty-six years later the story changed. In Testimony, a film about John Paul II shown at the Vatican in October 2008 and based on the memoir of his secretary of almost 40 years, Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz said the blade had reached the Pope and cut him, and that he had finished the ceremony without telling anyone.3 sources3 sources

The Santuário said it had learned of the account only from the press, on 15 October 2008. Krohn denies it. “What Dziwisz said is a lie,” he told Redmont: the bodyguards threw him to the ground at once, and although he was face to face with the Pope, John Paul II gave no sign of being hurt. He has also said that the police who followed him never saw him holding the weapon, and that he was convicted only because he confessed.3 sources3 sources

There is a coda in Lúcia's hand. On the day of the attack, 12 May 1982, she wrote to the Pope that the third part of the secret referred to the words she attributed to Our Lady in July 1917: that Russia would spread its errors through the world, and that “the Holy Father will have much to suffer”. The Vatican quoted the letter when it published the secret in 2000.1 source1 source

Krohn spent his first night in the hands of the Polícia Judiciária, the criminal investigation police, in Lisbon. He later called it the best night's sleep of his life. In August 1982 the public prosecutor charged him with attempted aggravated homicide of a head of state and with using and carrying a prohibited weapon.1 source1 source

For the first time a Portuguese court had a case the whole world was watching. The three judges had to decide whether Krohn was mad or responsible for his actions, and spent months working through his theological arguments. “My colleagues and I were aware that this trial was the first trial with a very large international repercussion,” the retired judge José Santos Cabral, one of the three, told Observador. On 7 February 1983 the court's experts found Krohn criminally responsible; his act, they wrote, had been driven “by an individual mystical and political evolution”.2 sources2 sources

The court read its judgment on 2 May 1983. Krohn answered the judges with “puppets, murderers, communists”, and he was tried again the same day, in his absence, for insulting the court. He went to the Vale de Judeus prison at Alcoentre on 9 August 1983. Under canon law he had also incurred excommunication, the penalty for anyone who uses physical violence against the Pope.1 source1 source

In prison Krohn gave up the priesthood and married in a civil ceremony; he has a son. By 2020 he had lived in Belgium for more than three decades. He described Vale de Judeus as “a horrible hell”, but said he bore no grudge against Portugal or the Portuguese, and that his worst problems there were with Spanish inmates.3 sources3 sources

He came to the attention of the police again. He was acquitted of a charge of setting fire to the Brussels headquarters of the Basque separatist party Herri Batasuna in 1996. In May 2000 he breached security to approach King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía of Spain during their visit to Belgium, and was sentenced to four months in prison for resisting arrest.1 source1 source

In 2020 he told El País that he did not regret what he calls his “gesture of Fátima”, but would not do it again. In 2022, for the 40th anniversary, he spoke to RTP for a documentary, and in remarks reported by 24notícias he said again that he regretted nothing: it was not a crime, he said, but a violent act, “politically incorrect”. In 2024, aged 74, he gave Observador a long interview in a hotel in central Brussels for its podcast series “Matar o Papa” (“Killing the Pope”).3 sources3 sources

On 25 March 1984, in St Peter's Square, John Paul II consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in union with the bishops of the world, an act that Lúcia later said was the consecration Our Lady had asked for. The statue from the Chapel of the Apparitions had been taken to the Vatican for the first time, and the Bishop of Leiria-Fátima, Alberto Cosme do Amaral, was in Rome with it. The next day the Pope handed the bishop a bullet. “I have a present here for Our Lady,” he told him.3 sources3 sources

For a while nobody at the Santuário knew what to do with it. In 1989, by decision of the bishop and the rector, it was set in the precious crown, under the small globe of turquoises. The historian Marco Daniel Duarte says that when it came to fitting it, the hole turned out to match the bullet's diameter exactly: chance, or, as many devotees read it, a sign that the place had been waiting for it.3 sources3 sources

The crown itself was a gift from the women of Portugal, who gave their jewellery on 13 October 1942 in thanks for the country's escape from the Second World War. Because the world was still at war, the bishop waited until 13 May 1946, when Cardinal Benedetto Aloisi Masella, Pius XII's legate, crowned the statue. The statue wears it only on the great pilgrimage days; on other days it has a simpler crown, and the precious one is on display.4 sources4 sources

On 27 December 1983 John Paul II visited Ağca in Rome's Rebibbia prison. “We met as fellow human beings and as brothers,” he said afterwards. Ağca spent 29 years in prison and was released on 18 January 2010.2 sources2 sources

John Paul II came back to Fátima twice. He returned on 12 and 13 May 1991, ten years after the shooting; on 13 May 2000 he beatified Francisco and Jacinta Marto, and that June the Vatican published the third secret, reading the “bishop dressed in white” as a vision of the century's persecutions and of the attack in St Peter's Square. On the eve of the beatification he gave Our Lady the gold ring with the words Totus Tuus he had worn for much of his pontificate.4 sources4 sources

The Santuário still carries marks of John Paul II: the porch of the Chapel of the Apparitions opened for his 1982 visit, the bullet in the crown and a square named after him. The night on the steps is less remembered. Krohn told investigators he alone was responsible. He came from the Catholic far right and saw a communist agent in a Pope admired across the West as an enemy of communism, and he struck at a shrine whose message had long been read as a prophecy against communism.4 sources4 sources