Pope John Paul II watched as Twin Towers fell: book

The late pope John Paul II watched the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center live on television, his personal secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz wrote in a memoir to be published Wednesday.

"The telephone rang, and ... he heard the petrified voice of Cardinal (Angelo) Sodano, the (Vatican) secretary of state. He had the television turned on, and could see those tragic images, the collapse of the Towers, with so many poor victims trapped inside," wrote Dziwisz in the memoir, "A Life with Karol."

"He spent the rest of the afternoon between the chapel and the television" at his summer residence in Castelgondolfo, near Rome, "carrying with him all his suffering," the book says.

Extracts of the book were released Monday by Italian publishing house Rizzoli.

When John Paul II held his general audience at the Vatican the following day, he began by asking pilgrims not to applaud, Dziwisz recalled, adding: "I remember his words: 'a dark day in human history' ... it was a day of struggle."

The pope was "worried, very worried, that it wouldn't end there, that the attack would trigger a spiral of violence without end," Dziwisz wrote in a chapter titled "Killing in the Name of God?"

Two years later, as the United States was assembling a "coalition of the willing" to invade Iraq, Dziwisz described in detail the frantic efforts John Paul II made to stop the war.

On March 16, 2003, the day before President George W. Bush issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, "the Holy Father repeated three times (during his Sunday Angelus prayer): 'There's still room (for negotiations)!', 'It's never too late!'" wrote Dziwisz, who was the pontiff's secretary for 40 years.

The pope "felt the need to evoke his personal witness, to recall that he belonged to the generation of those who had experienced war," Dziwisz wrote in the memoir, to be published in Poland on January 29.

Watching John Paul II speak from his window overlooking St Peter's Square, "I saw his face tense up more and more, and his right hand which seemed to want to give even more force to these words," Dziwisz added.

The pontiff "had the intuition" that the war in Iraq might "turn into a war of civilizations, or worse, a 'holy war'," he wrote.

gd/tw

AFPEntertainment-Vatican-pope-book

AFP 221811 GMT 01 07

COPYRIGHT 2006 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.

Related topics