About 50 Italian policemen with sniffer dogs searched the area around a tiny mountain church for a religious relic stained with the late Pope John Paul II’s blood — amid intense speculation that it was stolen by a satanic cult.
Vatican Radio denounced the “sacrilegious theft” of a framed cloth from the San Pietro della Ienca church in the Abruzzo region.
The cloth was one of three known blood-soaked pieces of the robe the beloved pontiff was wearing when he was shot in an assassination attempted in St. Peter’s Square in 1981.
Since such a revered relic would be almost impossible to sell, speculation focused on the theft being carried off by a satanic cult.
Satanists celebrate their “new year” on Feb. 1 and are believed to celebrate “black masses” using Catholic symbols to mock observant Christians.
“It’s possible that there could be satanic sects behind the theft of the reliquary, Giovanni Panunzio, national coordinator of an Italian anti-occult group called Osservatorio Antiplagio, told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “This sort of sacrilege often takes place at this time of year.”
John Paul died in 2005 and is scheduled to be made a saint on April 27.
In 2011, his former private secretary, Stanislaw Dziwisz, now the archbishop of Krakow in Poland, gave the local Abruzzo community the cloth as a token of the love John Paul felt for the mountainous area, where he often vacationed.