May 13, 1981: When Pope John Paul II drove across St. Peter’s Square in an open jeep, the Turkish right-wing extremist shot him Ali Agca low. Thanks to his good physical fitness, the Pope survived seriously injured.
To this day, the exact background of the crime, which happened in front of the eyes of a large crowd, is unclear. During the interrogations, the assassin made a wide variety of explanations, all of which contradicted each other, and the speculations about the possible perpetrators and, above all, the motives for the crime are based on the most varied of approaches. The most likely scenario is that the Bulgarian secret service organized the attack on behalf of Moscow. Because the Polish pontiff had stood up for the shipyard workers protesting in Danzig – and CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev was evidently more than concerned about this. However, this representation has not been proven.
John Paul II himself interwoven the events of May 13, 1981 with a religious theme that had started exactly 64 years earlier, also on May 13, with the first appearance of the so-called Woman of Fátima. On May 13, 1917, ten-year-old Lúcia dos Santos, her cousin, seven-year-old Jacinta Marto, and her brother, nine-year-old Francisco Marto, had a strange encounter while looking after the sheep in a field not far from the small Portuguese town of Fátima. Near a holm oak they saw a beautiful woman in a light-colored coat. The woman reportedly told the children that she had come down from heaven and asked them to come back in exactly a month.
Many years later, the Catholic Church recognized this and subsequent apparitions of women as miracles. In any case, John Paul was convinced that the wife of Fátima – the Blessed Mother – had saved his life because at the moment of the shots he had bent down to the believers who were holding out images from Fátima at him.
The two podcast moderators Felix Melching and David Neuhäuser use the opportunity to report on all possible assassination attempts in a quick run through the history of the Pope.
And here is the podcast: