It was a bold daylight heist. The thief snatched his prize from the Spoleto Cathedral in Italy’s Umbria region. It had been temporarily housed in the cathedral behind an iron gate but the alarm failed to go off, and the burglar escaped. A worker discovered the theft that night of September 23, 2020. But it wasn’t a famous painting, jewels, or cash that was nabbed. It was a small vial of blood. Specifically, the blood of Pope Saint John Paul II housed in a gold and crystal reliquary. It wasn’t the first time his blood has been targeted by thieves. It was the fourth and latest.
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Ever since the Catholic Church canonized John Paul II in 2014, a process that includes several steps (including verifying various miracles attributed to the would-be saint), relics related to his blood have been big targets. And the 2020 theft was no exception. While police believed they tracked down the man behind the heist (they didn’t give the press his name), a search of his house didn’t turn up the blood vial, which they believed was likely sold on the black market, where collectors snatch these rare types of reliquaries up. In some of the other cases, authorities have have recovered the saint’s blood.
In 2014, thieves stole the Pope’s bloody cloth
On May 13, 1981, escaped Turkish murderer Mehmet Ali Agca shot and wounded Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, Italy. The Pope survived the attempt on his life, and after his death in 2005 — and eventual sainthood — Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who had been the Pope’s secretary and advisor, began giving out John Paul II’s blood, some collected by doctors at the time of his assasination attempt and some later. The relics are often in the form of small vials of John Paul II’s blood or cloth stained with his blood.
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In 2016, thieves in Cologne, Germany smashed the glass at the base of a statue of Pope John Paul II and pried out one of these bloodstained pieces of cloth at the city’s famous cathedral. It was just one of many Catholic relics that have never been recovered. Cardinal Dziwisz later gave the Cologne archbishop a replacement relic with a drop of the new saint’s blood.
In a similar heist two years earlier, in January 2014, two thieves stole a relic with a blood-stained piece of cloth from the cossack the Pope was wearing during his attempted assassination. It was snatched from a tiny church in L’Aquila in Italy’s Apennine mountains, where the Pope had loved to ski. In this case, the police quickly recovered the reliquary and the cloth, minus some gold threads, and charged two local men with the crime.
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In one case, thieves had no idea what they’d taken
While in these other thefts of Pope John Paul II’s blood, the criminals knew exactly what they were taking, in 2012, three thieves on an Italian train had no idea what they had. Two years before the Catholic Church sainted Pope John Paul II, a priest was on a train headed north from Rome when the criminals snatched his backpack. Even before being sainted, the Church was allowing relics of Pope John Paul II to be venerated by parishioners. The priest was carrying the vial of blood to a suburb of Rome where it was to be put on display. The thieves, having no idea whose blood they had, tossed the vial into the bushes near a train station in Marina di Cerveteri, where they’d disembarked.
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These strange thefts of blood caused a stir online where people came up with wild theories ranging from Satanists using the blood for nefarious purposes to cloning schemes to secret societies. The most likely answer is that the thieves are selling the relics on the black market, as police believed was the case with the theft in 2020. But besides being illegal to buy and sell stolen property, trading in relics is considered a big no-no with the Catholic Church and is strictly forbidden. That said, there seems to be collectors willing to flaunt the law and the Church to get their hands on blood-related relics of Saint Pope John Paul II.
