The flesh, struck with about twenty stab wounds, is bruised. But morale is pretty good. “I am well thanks to the team of psychologists. Everyone is very nice here. Operated on Sunday evening after his attack in the Saint-Pierre d’Arène church, in Nice, Father Krzysztof Rudzinski gave his news in Nice morning.
Questioned by telephone from his hospital bed, the religious evokes “the shock, the pain”. He also admits that his recovery “will take time”. But he is also delighted to be “alive”, “a chance”, he says, given the violence of the attack.
The nun who intervened “saved” him
Sunday, around 10 am, just before mass, a faithful of the parish threw himself on him armed with a 10 cm blade. This 31-year-old man with a fragile psychiatric profile and whose motivations remain very troubled, was hospitalized.
And if the days of the priest were not in danger, his wounds are deep. Hit in the lung, in the leg, Father Krzysztof Rudzinski also risks losing the use of his left arm, according to the regional daily. “I grabbed the knife so it wouldn’t hit me in the heart,” he explains in Nice morning. And he is sure of it: it was the intervention of a nun, present at the time of the events, which “saved” him.
“Divine Intervention”
“I intervened. The attacker raised his hand. I wanted to take the knife and I received a blow”, said Sister Marie-Claude, injured in her fingers, at 20 minutes. Heroic, it rather puts forward “an extraordinary, divine intervention, of the angels, of the Virgin”. “The man stopped. He remained with his arms dangling. We were both. Other people were there, but at the back of the church, she remembers. And if it hadn’t been for that invisible hand, neither the father nor I would be here. »
The 57-year-old priest is already thinking about the future. “I must continue. I want to go back to my church to help people,” he said to Nice morning. In the meantime, he claims to draw his strength from the support of the people of Nice, and from the messages he receives “from Brazil, Germany, the United States, from all over the world”.