Castel Sant'Angelo at Risk of Collapse

REUTERS, Aug. 30 — Italy has said it will pump more than $1.2 million of emergency funding into Rome's Castel Sant' Angelo after a newspaper published an exposé of its decay, including holes in the walls, faulty wiring and crumbling brickwork, Reuters reported.

“The problems faced by this extraordinary monument that represents the heart of Rome demands an extraordinary effort,” Culture Minister Rocco Buttiglione told reporters.

The imposing fortress overlooks the Tiber River and backs onto the Vatican City. It was originally a mausoleum for Emperor Hadrian in 139 A.D. and later became part of the city walls, medieval citadel, jail, refuge for besieged popes and more recently a museum that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

Newspaper Editor Calls John Paul II ‘a Martyr’

EXPRESSINDIA.COM, Aug. 26 — The editor of the Vatican newspaper said that Pope John Paul II was a “martyr” even though he survived a 1981 assassination attempt, reported the Indian news service ExpressIndia.

Mario Agnes, editor-in-chief of the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano, told an annual pro-Catholic political meeting that the stones in St. Peter's Square where John Paul's blood was shed should be preserved because it was the blood of “an authentic martyred Pope.”

Ever since Pope Benedict XVI announced May 13 that he was putting John Paul on the fast track for possible sainthood, there have been questions about whether he could be declared a martyr. Doing so would remove the need for the Vatican to confirm that a miracle attributed to his intercession had occurred after his April 2 death for him to be beatified.

Aide Recalls John Paul II's Last Hours

ASSOCIATED PRESS, Aug. 27 — As he lay near death, Pope John Paul II was aware of the crowd in St. Peter's Square below his apartment window and calmly viewed death as a “passage from one room to another,” a longtime secretary said in an interview broadcast Friday night.

“He heard everything,” Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, said in an interview with TG5, an Italian television station, in Krakow, Poland where he was installed as archbishop. “He heard the square, he heard the prayer, the presence of the young people. The Holy Father heard, because he was conscious right to the end, almost to the end, even the last day.”

Archbishop Dziwisz said the last words he heard the Pope say were totus tuus, the Pope's Latin motto for “completely yours,” dedicating himself to the Virgin Mary. He said a nun who was near the Pope in his final hours told him that she heard the Pope say, “Let me go to the Lord.”

“We were at his side in these last moments,” Archbishop Dziwisz told TG5. “For him, death was really a passage from one room to another, from one life to another.”