The Day They Shot the Pope: The Attempted Assassination of John Paul II

May 13, 2024
10 min read

Updated: May 13

Pope John Paul II and Mehmet Ali Agca with assassination attempt background.

On the afternoon of 13 May 1981, a 23-year-old Turkish gunman stood among the faithful in St. Peter's Square and fired four shots at the most recognisable man on Earth. What followed wasn't just a news story. It became one of the defining mysteries of the Cold War: a tale of shadowy intelligence networks, a criminal underworld stretching from Ankara to Sofia, and a remarkable act of forgiveness that nobody had seen coming.

A Date That Meant Something

The shooting happened to fall on 13 May, the 64th anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children in Fátima, Portugal, in 1917. That date would later take on enormous significance. At the exact moment Mehmet Ali Ağca opened fire in Rome, a pre-recorded message from the Pope was being read aloud to pilgrims at the Fátima shrine in Portugal. Nobody planned it that way, and nobody could explain it away easily either.

Pope John Paul II waves to crowd from his popemobile. — Agca was a 23-year-old militant of the notorious far-right Grey Wolves, on the run from Turkish justice facing murder charges, when he resurfaced in Saint Peter's Square on May 13, 1981, and fired on the pope driving by in an open vehicle

Who Was Mehmet Ali Ağca?

Born on 9 January 1958 in the Turkish province of Malatya, Ağca didn't drift into violence gradually. By his late teens he'd become embedded with the Grey Wolves, a far-right Turkish ultranationalist organisation with ties to politicians, intelligence officers and police commanders, and a long history of political killings.

On 1 February 1979, Ağca murdered Abdi İpekçi, the editor of the prominent Istanbul newspaper Milliyet, in front of İpekçi's home. İpekçi had been writing exposés of Turkey's far-right groups in the months before his death. Ağca was caught in June 1979, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.

He didn't stay long. On 25 November 1979, he escaped from a high-security military prison, reportedly wearing a private's uniform and simply walking out, which immediately suggested he'd had inside help. He left behind a letter in his cell addressed to a Turkish newspaper. It read: "Western imperialists who are afraid of Turkey's unity of political, military, and economic power with the brotherly Islamic countries are sending the Crusader Commander John Paul under the mask of a religious leader. If this ill-timed and meaningless visit is not called off, I will definitely shoot the pope. This is the only reason that I escaped from prison."

The Pope went ahead with his November 1979 visit to Turkey anyway. Security was tightened and nothing happened. A Turkish court convicted Ağca of murder in absentia, and he vanished.

The Long Road to Rome

After his escape, Ağca fled to Bulgaria with the help of Abdullah Çatlı, the Grey Wolves' second-in-command, and used the country as a base of operations. Bulgaria at the time was a known hub for Turkish mafia activity. Investigative journalist Lucy Komisar later reported that Ağca and Çatlı had worked together on the İpekçi assassination and that Çatlı may have played a role in organising the later attempt on the Pope. When Çatlı was killed in a car crash years later, a passport found on him bore the alias "Mehmet Özbay", one of the names Ağca himself had regularly travelled under.

From August 1980, Ağca began moving methodically across the Mediterranean, switching identities and altering passports, apparently to obscure his point of origin in Sofia. He enrolled at the University for Foreigners in Perugia in April 1981 under an assumed name, attending just one class but securing a three-month Italian visa in the process. The Grey Wolves had already arranged his weapon: a 9mm Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol, serial number 76C23953, purchased from an Austrian contact and stored in the left-luggage section of a Milan railway station.

He checked into the Hotel Torino in Rome on 13 April 1981 and called a Grey Wolves contact in Hanover, West Germany, presumably for final instructions. He re-entered the city on 10 May by train from Milan. He was in position three days later.

On the morning of 13 May, Ağca got up at 7am, had breakfast, and took a long walk through Rome. In his pocket was a handwritten note with personal reminders that included "Careful with food" and "Wear a cross." Also in his pocket, found when he was arrested, was a second note that read: "I am killing the pope as a protest against the imperialism of the Soviet Union and the United States and against the genocide that is being carried out in Salvador and Afghanistan." His stated motives were all over the place, and they always would be.

Pope John Paul II supported by men after 1981 assassination attempt. — John Paul II was seriously wounded in the abdomen and Agca spent the next 19 years in Italian prisons

In 1979, The New York Times detailed Ağca's menacing threat against the Pope, branding him as the "masked leader of the Crusades" and warning of dire consequences should he proceed with his planned visit to Turkey. Despite these ominous words, the Pope's visit did take place in late November 1979. Ağca justified his threat as retaliation for the ongoing attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, a situation he attributed to either the United States or Israel.

From August 1980 onward, Ağca embarked on a series of journeys across the Mediterranean. He later testified to meetings with three cohorts in Rome: one Turkish and two Bulgarian individuals. Allegedly, Zilo Vassilev, the Bulgarian military attaché in Italy, oversaw the operation, orchestrated at the behest of Turkish mafioso Bekir Çelenk in Bulgaria. However, Le Monde diplomatique countered this narrative, implicating Abdullah Çatlı as the mastermind behind the assassination attempt, purportedly in exchange for a considerable sum paid by Çelenk to the Grey Wolves.

The Moment of the Shooting

Wednesday 13 May 1981 was a warm spring afternoon in Rome. More than 10,000 people had gathered in St. Peter's Square for the Pope's weekly public audience. At around 4:50pm, John Paul II climbed into his white Fiat popemobile and began circling the elliptical plaza, reaching into the crowd, lifting children, blessing rosaries.

At precisely 17:17, as the vehicle passed the ancient obelisk at the centre of the square, Ağca raised his pistol above the heads of the crowd and fired. The Pope had just bent down to hug a small girl wearing a tiny icon of Our Lady of Fátima. According to later accounts, that instinctive movement may have been the difference between survival and death. Had he remained upright, the bullets were on course for his skull.

Two bullets struck John Paul II, entering his abdomen and narrowly missing major arteries. A third bullet passed through his left hand and a fourth hit his right arm. Two bystanders were also wounded: 60-year-old American tourist Ann Odre, hit in the chest, and 21-year-old Jamaican visitor Rose Hill, struck in the arm.

Pope John Paul II visits man in prison cell, bars visible. — In his book Memory and Identity John Paul II said he was convinced that the plot was planned and commissioned and that Agca was a mere puppet

Ağca's gun was knocked from his hand almost immediately. A nun in the crowd grabbed his wrist, and Vatican security chief Camillo Cibin along with several bystanders tackled him to the ground. His accomplice Oral Çelik, who'd been standing nearby with a small bomb intended to cause a diversionary explosion, panicked and fled without detonating it or firing a single shot.

The Pope slumped into the arms of his personal secretary, Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, visibly repeating the words "Mary, my mother" as blood spread across his white cassock. His aides rushed him into a waiting ambulance. Rome's afternoon rush hour meant the four-mile drive to the Gemelli Hospital took close to 25 minutes. "A few more minutes, some obstruction along the way," Cardinal Dziwisz later recalled, "and it would have been fatal." The Pope underwent more than five hours of surgery and was listed in critical but stable condition. No vital organ had been hit.

Four days after the shooting, still in his hospital bed, John Paul II recorded a message asking people to pray for his attacker, whom he called "my brother" and said he'd sincerely forgiven.

Who Ordered It?

Ağca's initial claim was that he'd acted alone. Then in 1982, he changed his story entirely and said Bulgarian intelligence had organised the operation on behalf of the Soviet KGB.

His account had a specific logic to it. John Paul II was one of the most prominent anti-communist voices in the world, a Polish pope who'd openly supported the Solidarity trade union movement in his homeland, and whose 1979 visit to Poland had drawn millions into the streets in a way that visibly unnerved Moscow. Soviet leader Brezhnev, just months before the shooting, had publicly warned that "the pillars of the socialist state were crumbling in Poland."

White open-top official vehicle, SCV 1 license plate, with yellow flags. — The Fiat Popemobile in which Pope John Paul II was the subject of an assassination attempt. This vehicle is now in the "Carriage museum" in Vatican City.

Ağca claimed he'd met three accomplices in Rome: one fellow Turk and two Bulgarians, with the overall operation commanded by Zilo Vassilev, the Bulgarian military attaché in Italy. He said Turkish mafioso Bekir Çelenk, based in Bulgaria, had arranged the mission and paid for it, reportedly offering $1.2 million. The head of Balkan Airlines' Rome office, Sergei Antonov, was arrested in late 1982 in connection with the plot. Italian investigators said Ağca had been able to describe Antonov's office in accurate detail, and police found a list in Ağca's possession that included Antonov's phone number alongside that of the Bulgarian embassy in Rome.

Documents later recovered from the former East German Stasi reportedly confirmed KGB involvement, though Stasi chief Markus Wolf flatly denied it. In March 2006, an Italian parliamentary commission cited new photographic analysis and concluded that Soviet leadership had ordered the assassination because of the Pope's support for Solidarity and the wider threat Catholicism posed to communist control in Poland.

But the Soviet/Bulgarian theory was never the only one in circulation. Komisar argued that a more plausible explanation pointed to a rightist conspiracy involving NATO's secret "stay-behind" networks, civilian militias trained across Europe during the Cold War to resist a potential Soviet invasion. Le Monde diplomatique went further, alleging that the real architect of the plot wasn't Bulgarian intelligence at all, but Abdullah Çatlı of the Grey Wolves, who'd supposedly been paid by Çelenk to organise the hit.

The question was never definitively resolved. When the 1985 trial of Bulgarian and Turkish co-defendants opened in Rome, it collapsed almost immediately when Ağca, the prosecution's star witness, declared himself to be Jesus Christ, predicted the imminent end of the world, and claimed that God had personally directed him to shoot the Pope. The case against the other defendants fell apart.

A Prison Meeting That Made History

In December 1983, Pope John Paul II visited Ağca at Rome's Rebibbia prison. They spoke privately for around 20 minutes, and the Pope has said very little about what was discussed. At the end of the meeting, Ağca was seen to kiss the papal ring. Some observers speculated he may have made a confession of some kind, though there's no record of what actually passed between them.

The Pope stayed in contact with Ağca's family for years afterwards, meeting his mother in 1987 and his brother Adnan a decade later. When Ağca's brother later spoke publicly following the Pope's death, he described the bond that had developed between the two men as a genuine friendship that had extended warmly to their entire family.

The Fátima Connection

While recovering in hospital, John Paul II asked for the Vatican's sealed envelope containing the Third Secret of Fátima to be brought to him. He read it and became convinced it had foretold the events of 13 May. The Third Secret, when eventually published by the Vatican in June 2000, described a vision of a "bishop clothed in white" who "falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire." The Vatican interpreted this as a prophecy of the 1981 shooting.

On the first anniversary of the attempt, the Pope travelled to Fátima, where he met the only surviving visionary, Sister Lúcia. He placed his bloodstained sash at the feet of the statue of the Virgin Mary and donated one of the bullets from the shooting to be set into the crown of the statue, where it remains to this day. His biographer George Weigel later recorded the Pope's own words about the moment Ağca fired: "One hand fired, and another guided the bullet."

Ağca himself, in a 1985 interview, had already speculated about the Fátima connection, two years before the Pope made his own views publicly known.

After Italy: Turkey, Release and Later Life

In June 2000, at the Pope's personal request, Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi pardoned Ağca and ordered his deportation to Turkey. He hadn't finished serving his time there, though. Back in Turkey, he faced conviction for the 1979 murder of İpekçi and for two bank robberies carried out in the 1970s. He was jailed again. In 2006, he was released on parole, but the Turkish Supreme Court then ruled that his years in Italian prison couldn't be counted against his Turkish sentence, and he was sent back.

He was finally released from Turkish custody on 18 January 2010, having spent close to 29 years in prison across two countries.

In early 2005, as the Pope's health deteriorated rapidly, Ağca sent a letter wishing him well and, in characteristic fashion, warning of the imminent end of the world. The Pope died on 2 April 2005.

In a 2023 interview for the documentary series Spy Ops, Ağca explained his original intention: "I wanted to leave a mark on history and then leave." His plan, he said, had been to kill the Pope and then kill himself. He'd fired twice before his gun jammed. He admitted he'd also wavered in the square before pulling the trigger, and had almost walked away without doing it at all.

What We Still Don't Know

More than four decades on, the full story of who ordered the shooting of Pope John Paul II remains unresolved. A Turkish hitman with far-right ties, Bulgarian intelligence officers, the Soviet KGB, a Turkish mob boss, NATO's shadow armies and Cold War back-channels have all been named in various accounts. Some of those threads lead somewhere. None of them lead all the way.

What isn't disputed is what happened in the aftermath: a man who'd tried to kill one of the world's most visible leaders was forgiven, visited in his cell, and corresponded with that leader's family long after both had left prison behind.

Whether it was divine protection, a fortunate instinct or sheer chance that guided those bullets past the arteries they could have hit, the outcome mattered. John Paul II survived to play a significant part in dismantling Soviet control over Eastern Europe. The man who shot him was eventually released into an ordinary life, largely forgotten. The question of who sent him has never been answered.