What does faith look like when it curdles into fanaticism? Sometimes, it wears a black suit and carries a bayonet. On May 12, 1982, Pope John Paul II was in Fátima, Portugal, giving thanks for surviving an assassin’s bullet the year prior. The procession was solemn, a river of devotion. Juan María Fernández y Krohn, a Spanish traditionalist ordained in the schismatic Archbishop Lefebvre’s sect, waited. He believed the Pope was an agent of Moscow and a destroyer of the true Church through the Second Vatican Council. In his twisted logic, the Pope was not merely wrong; he was the Antichrist. Murder would be a sacrament.
As the Pope passed, Krohn broke from the crowd. He wielded a bayonet, a weapon of battlefield thrusts, not theological dispute. The act was absurd, pathetic, and deadly serious. Security guards, perhaps more accustomed to managing enthusiastic crowds than armed clerics, wrestled him to the ground before the blade found its mark. The Pope continued praying, either unaware or profoundly disciplined. Krohn was subdued, screaming that the Pope must be killed.
The event is a footnote, overshadowed by the earlier, nearly successful shooting in St. Peter’s Square. But it holds a darker, stranger question. The first assassin, Mehmet Ali Ağca, was a geopolitical tool, a hired gun. Krohn was a product of the very institution the Pope led—a man so consumed by a purified idea of his faith that its supreme shepherd became its ultimate enemy. His weapon was not a hidden pistol, but a symbol of honorable combat, perverted. It was faith turned in on itself, a howl of absolutism against a pope preaching mercy. The attack failed. The contradiction it embodied did not.