Pope John Paul 'was stabbed by priest'

The late Pope John Paul II was wounded by a knife-wielding priest in 1982, a year after he was shot in St. Peter's Square, but the injury was kept secret, his former aide says in a documentary.

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz also discloses on film that when John Paul, then 84, was unable to pronounce words several days before his death in 2005, he told his aides in a whisper that, "If I can't speak any more, it's time for me to go." He died days later on April 2, 2005.

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Dziwisz, now cardinal of Krakow, Poland, was private secretary and aide to John Paul for nearly 40 years, including his 27-year papacy.

Testimony, narrated by British actor Michael York, is a film version of a memoir Dziwisz published last year, with some additions.

Its Vatican premiere is tonight in the presence of Pope Benedict.

On May 12, 1982, John Paul was visiting the shrine city of Fatima in Portugal to give thanks for surviving a first assassination attempt a year earlier on May 13, 1981, when he was shot in St. Peter's Square by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca.

A crazed ultra-conservative Spanish priest, Juan Fernandez Krohn, lunged at John Paul with a dagger, but was knocked to the ground by police and arrested. That the knife actually reached John Paul and cut him was not known until now.

"I can now reveal that the Holy Father was wounded. When we got back to the room (in the sanctuary complex), there was blood," Dziwisz says on film. John Paul continued his trip but kept the wound secret. Krohn served several years in prison before Portugal expelled the Spaniard.