By David Willey BBC News, Rome Previously unpublished details of an assassination attempt on the late Pope John Paul II in Portugal in 1982 have been revealed in a film based on the memoirs of the Pope's former private secretary. In the film, due to be shown at the Vatican this week, the late Pope's aide Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz tells how a deranged priest drew blood when he tried More.. to kill John Paul with a bayonet during a religious ceremony at the Fatima shrine. Cardinal Dziwisz served as John Paul's private secretary for nearly 40 years, including all his 27 years as Pope, and is the cardinal of Krakow in Poland. I was covering the event for the BBC from Portugal at the time of the attack, and reported immediately from Lisbon the rumours that there had been another attempt on the Pope's life. It came exactly a year after a Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, had shot and wounded the pope in Saint Peter's Square in Rome. Attack denied But that same evening, the Vatican formally denied there had been another assassination attempt. The following day, Portuguese television broadcast footage of the attack. It was carried out by a mentally unbalanced Spanish priest who was arrested after being jumped on by the Pope's bodyguard, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. Archbishop Marcinkus laughed this off when I asked him what had happened. "You can't always believe what you see on television," he told me. The Pope continued his trip without disclosing his wound. The priest who carried out the attack, Juan Maria Fernandez y Krohn, was later tried and sentenced to over six years' imprisonment for his crime. He was then expelled from Portugal. The Vatican has always been secretive about the health of a reigning pope, although the huge increase in media interest in Vatican affairs as a result of the long reign and foreign travels of John Paul II - which lasted more than a quarter of a century - has led to slightly great...