A fortnight ago saw the 21st anniversary of the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. While many people vividly recall the dramatic scenes when Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca opened fire on the Pope in St Peters Square on May 13, 1981, few recall that it was the first of three known assassination plots to kill the Slavic Pontiff who went on to lead the Church for another 24 years.
John Paul II attributed his survival from the near-fatal 1981 attack to the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima. It was a cruel irony then that it was at Fatima almost a year to the day that Fr Juan María Fernández y Krohn, then a priest of the renegade Society of Saint Pius, tried to stab the Pope with a bayonet.
During his trial, he said 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.
John Paul II went on to fight another day and the next known assassination attempt was during a visit to the Philippines in 1995.
As part of the Bojinka plot, Islamists led by Ramzi Yousef, planned to assassinate the Pope by dressing a suicide bomber as a priest.
The assassin planned to get close to the Pope, and detonate the bomb.
The planned assassination of the Pope was intended to divert attention from the next phase of the operation which was to blow up passenger planes.
Authorities said that about 20 men had been trained to carry out the attack before it was abandoned as the plan started to unravel.