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—— ON THIS DAY ——
MAY 13, 1981
St. Peter's Square, Vatican City
44 years ago
Pope John Paul II — photographed in February 1980, one year before the assassination attempt that would have killed most people but that he survived to interpret as a divine intervention.
On May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was travelling through St. Peter's Square in his open vehicle — the Popemobile — greeting a crowd of approximately 300,000 people when Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turkish gunman, opened fire at close range. Four bullets struck the Pope; two passed through his body, damaging his colon, small intestine, and left index finger. Two others wounded bystanders. The Pope fell, bleeding heavily, into the arms of his secretary.
He survived by what many cardinals and doctors later described as a medical miracle. Two bullets had narrowly missed major blood vessels. He received multiple blood transfusions and underwent five hours of emergency surgery. During the surgery, Vatican radio broadcast that the Pope was in serious condition; prayers were said in churches across the world. He left the hospital after three months, having lost twenty-two pounds and received what surgeons described as injuries inconsistent with survival.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
St. Peter's Square, Vatican City — the piazza where 300,000 people were gathered on May 13, 1981, when shots rang out and the Pope fell.
The question of who ordered the assassination attempt has never been definitively resolved. Ağca had escaped from a Turkish prison in 1979 after murdering a newspaper editor, and had been connected to a Turkish far-right organization called the Grey Wolves. His links to Bulgarian intelligence — and through Bulgaria to the Soviet KGB — were investigated intensively through the 1980s; Italian courts found sufficient evidence to convict several Bulgarians, but the convictions were later overturned on appeal for insufficient evidence. The Soviet connection remains historically disputed.
John Paul II interpreted his survival as a message from the Virgin Mary, whose feast day (Our Lady of Fátima) fell on May 13, 1981. He donated the bullet removed from his body to the Fátima shrine in Portugal, where it was set into the crown of the Virgin's statue. In 1983, he visited Ağca in prison in Rome and forgave him personally and publicly — one of the most photographed acts of Christian forgiveness of the century. Ağca was released from prison, served time in Turkey for the 1979 murder, and was freed in 2010. He visited the Pope's tomb in 2005.
John Paul II's papacy, which ran from 1978 to 2005, was one of the most consequential in the modern Catholic Church. His support for the Solidarity movement in Poland contributed directly to the collapse of communist rule there, and his example emboldened dissident movements across Eastern Europe. His social teaching — conservative on sexual ethics, progressive on labor rights and global poverty — positioned the Church in ways that still define it. He was beatified in 2011 and canonized in 2014.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The assassination attempt and its aftermath made John Paul II's papacy a global media event in a way that no previous pontificate had been. The shooting, the survival, and the public forgiveness were covered by television cameras and international press in ways that transformed the papacy's relationship with the modern media landscape permanently.
The unresolved question of Soviet involvement in the assassination attempt remains one of the Cold War's most significant open files. If the KGB did order the killing of a pope whose encouragement of Solidarity was undermining Soviet control of Poland, it would be one of the most audacious acts of state terrorism in modern history. The evidence is suggestive but not conclusive.
The forgiveness visit to Ağca in prison became a model for reconciliation theology that influenced Catholic thinking about justice, punishment, and mercy. John Paul II's consistent advocacy for abolishing the death penalty — partly informed by the experience of his own survival — strengthened the Church's anti-capital punishment position in ways that persist today.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On May 13, 1981, a Polish pope was shot four times in St. Peter's Square and survived. He credited the Virgin Mary. He forgave his attacker. He spent the next twenty-four years of his papacy changing the world. The man who shot him was eventually released; both men are still alive in the public memory, preserved in a photograph taken in a prison cell.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"I spoke with him as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust."
— Pope John Paul II, after visiting Mehmet Ali Ağca in prison, December 27, 1983
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the 1981 assassination attempt, the unresolved question of Soviet involvement, John Paul II's forgiveness of his attacker, and the extraordinary role of this papacy in ending communist rule in Europe?
