Assassination Attempt

On May 13, 1981, a 23-year-old Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, arrived at St. Peter's Square for John Paul II's weekly general audience. The area was divided into sections by short wooden barricades that formed an impromptu motorway along which John Paul II would be driven in his open-air "Popemobile to greet the crowd. Mehmet found a spot just behind a row of pilgrims pressed against one of the barricades, no more than 10 feet from where the Pope would pass. He waited and at 5 PM, the small Popemobile drove through the Archway of the Bells and into the square with a smiling John Paul II standing in the back greeting the crowd. At 5:13 PM the crowd heard something peculiar. Standing behind the first row of pilgrims at one of the wooden railings, Mehmet fired two shots at the Pope. Pope John Paul II was struck in the abdomen and fell backward into the arms of his secretary. They immediately rushed him to the hospital. In the ambulance, he lost consciousness. At the hospital, he was given the last rites. The surgeons worked to stabilize the Pope and spent more than 5 hours of surgery to mend the several wounds to his abdomen, colon and small intestine. The damage was severe, and the possibility of death was real. Mehmet, a professional assassin, had fired at point-blank range and was not successful in killing Pope John Paul II. John Paul would later say that "one hand fired, and another guided the bullet." His main abdominal artery was missed by a fraction of an inch which would have caused him to bleed to death. The bullet also badly missed his spinal column which would have completely paralyzed him. God's Providence in this event revealed itself even further. The day of the attempted assassination was May 13th, and the time in which he was shot was 5:13, which numerically matched May 13th. May 13th is the Feast day of Our Lady of Fatima. After the attach, John Paul immediately began praying for her intercession, repeating the words, "Mary, my mother... Mary, my mother." On May 13th, 1917, Our Lady of Fatima had appeared to three children in rural Portugal. She told the children three secrets, the third secret had not been publicly revealed. Once John Paul was stabilized and in recover, he asked to read that third secret which included a description of a bishop dressed in white who suffers a deadly attack. On reading this, all of John Paul's remaining doubts were gone. The only bishop who dresses I white is the pope. He believed that this attempt on his life had a deep connection to Our Lady of Fatima and that Mary had spared his life. One year later, the Pope made a pilgrimage to Fatima to thank Mary for her protection. Following the shooting, one of the most moving moments was John Paul's meeting with his assassin. John Paul visited Mehmet in prison about two years later and sat down with him, one-on-one. In his book, Memory and Identity, the Pope explains what happened, "I visited my attacker in prison. We spoke at length. Mehmet, as everyone knows, was a professional assassin. This means that the attack was not his own initiative, it was someone else's idea; someone else's idea; someone else had commissioned him to carry it out. In the course of our conversation, it became clear that Mehmet was still wondering how the attempted assassination could possibly have failed. He had planned it meticulously, attending to every tiny detail. and yet his intended vicim had escaped death. How could this have happened? The interesting thing was his perplexity had led him to the religious question. He wanted to know about the secret of Fatima, and what the secret actually was. this was his principal concern; more than anything else, he wanted to know this. Perhaps those insistent questions showed that he had grasped something really important. Mehmet had probably sensed that over and above his own power, over and above the power of shooting and killing, there was a higher power. He then began to look for it. I hope and pray that he found it."

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