Il Terremoto, il passaporto e l'attentato al Papa

Pope John Paul II

As he entered St. Peter's Square to address an audience on the 13th of May 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot and critically wounded by Mehmet Ali Ağca, an expert Turkish gunman who was a member of the militant fascist group Grey Wolves.

The assassin used a Browning 9 mm semi-automatic pistol, shooting the pope in the abdomen and perforating his colon and small intestine multiple times.

John Paul II was rushed into the Vatican complex and then to the Gemelli Hospital. On the way to the hospital, he lost consciousness. Even though the two bullets missed his mesenteric artery and abdominal aorta, he lost nearly three-quarters of his blood.

He underwent five hours of surgery to treat his wounds. Surgeons performed a colostomy, temporarily rerouting the upper part of the large intestine to let the damaged lower part heal.

When he briefly regained consciousness before being operated on, he instructed the doctors not to remove his Brown Scapular during the operation.

One of the few people allowed in to see him at the Gemelli Clinic was one of his closest friend, philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, who arrived on Saturday 16 May and kept him company while he recovered from emergency surgery.

The pope later stated that the Blessed Virgin Mary helped keep him alive throughout his ordeal.

For everything that happened to me on that very day, I felt that extraordinary motherly protection and care, which turned out to be stronger than the deadly bullet

Ağca was caught and restrained by a nun and other bystanders until police arrived. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Two days after Christmas in 1983, John Paul II visited Ağca in prison. John Paul II and Ağca spoke privately for about twenty minutes. John Paul II said, "What we talked about will have to remain a secret between him and me.

I spoke to him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust."

Numerous other theories were advanced to explain the assassination attempt, some of them controversial.

One such theory advanced by Michael Ledeen and heavily pushed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency at the time of the assassination but never substantiated by evidence, was that the Soviet Union was behind the attempt on John Paul II's life in retaliation for the pope's support of Solidarity, the Catholic, and pro-democratic Polish workers'

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