ROME – Less than a month after a man on New York’s Most Wanted List was arrested in St. Peter’s Square with three knives ahead of a papal audience, a parish priest from the Czech Republic was detained on Sunday before the pontiff’s Angelus address after being found to have an air gun, two knives, a box cutter and a screwdriver in his bag.
According to media reports, the 59-year-old priest, identified as Father Milan Palkovic, who was wearing a cassock, claimed the items didn’t belong to him but to another man attending the Angelus, who was also detained, and that they were for “personal defence".
