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Pope John Paul’s old Ford up for auction

If it hadn’t once been owned by Pope John Paul II, this light blue 1975 Ford Escort GL wouldn’t attract a second glance. There are too many nicks and dents and too few frills on the boxy four-door sedan due for auction Saturday in a Las Vegas casino showroom. It has no hubcaps, no air conditioning, no radio. The engine, built 30 years ago at a Ford plant in Cologne, Germany, won’t even start.

But just imagine the pope — whose hands blessed millions all over the world — clutching the padded steering wheel and downshifting while flooring the gas pedal and praying the little 1.1liter engine would crest a steep Italian hill. “Christ had a donkey,” auctioneer Dean Kruse said as workers prepped and polished the car for the auction at Las Vegas Hilton. “This was a humble car for a humble man.” Kruse likes to imagine Cardinal Karol Wojtyla driving around Poland before he became pope in 1978, and later dressing in commoners’ clothing to head into the Italian mountains for rest, relaxation and reflection. That was before a 1981 assassination attempt prompted Vatican security officials to put the brakes on the pope’s solo drives into the countryside.

The car comes with possible papal possessions: carved wooden rosary beads, a box of wooden matches, a candy tin and a dashboard medallion bearing the likeness of St Maria Goretti, the patron of youth, young women, purity and victims of rape. And just imagine the stories behind those dings and scratches. “It appears to me he was a pretty bad driver,” auction employee Rick Limpp said as he wiped fingerprints from a chrome bumper with obvious hammer marks from repairs. Kruse said he thought the car might fetch as much as $3 million in the auction. That would be considerably more that the $1,200 Kruse has said it might sell for on a used car lot and more than 30 times the $102,000 that Sugar Grove, Ill., businessman Jim Rich paid the last time Kruse auctioned the car in 1996. The Escort, not to be confused with the bullet-resistant glass “popemobile” that became famous during John Paul II’s world tours, spent several years on display at Rich’s restaurant in Sugar Grove. It has been kept since June at the Kruse Automotive and Carriage Museum in Auburn, Ind.

“While the car is a very inexpensive car, there’s a story that goes with it,” Kruse said. ap

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