A reliquary containing the blood of the late Pope John Paul II has been stolen from a small church in the mountains east of Rome.

Franca Corrieri said she discovered a broken window early on Sunday morning, and called the police who discovered the gold reliquary and a crucifix were missing.

John Paul, who died in 2005, loved the mountains in the Abruzzo region and would sometimes secretly slip away from the Vatican to hike or ski there and pray in the stone church.

Polish-born John Paul, who reigned for 27 years, is due to be made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church in May, meaning the relic will become more noteworthy and valuable.

In 2011, John Paul's former private secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, gave the local Abruzzo community some of the late pontiff's blood as a token of the love he had felt for the mountainous area.

It was put in a gold and glass circular case and kept in a niche of the mountain church of San Pietro della Ienca, near the city of L'Aquila.

Ms Corrieri said the incident felt more like a "kidnapping" than a theft.

"In a sense, a person has been stolen," she said.

She said she could not say if the intention of the thieves may have been to seek a ransom for the blood.

Apart from the reliquary and a crucifix, nothing else was stolen from the isolated church, even though Ms Corrieri said the thieves would probably have had time to take other objects during the night-time theft.

Some of John Paul's blood was saved after an assassination attempt that nearly killed him in St Peter's Square on May 13, 1981.

Reuters