A scene under the eyes of the photographers who in a flash went around the world: Pope John Paul II collapses in the popemobile, as he goes around the faithful in St. Peter's Square before the general audience.
Someone in the crowd fired two shots and the Pontiff was transported to the hospital dying.
It was May 13, 1981.
The man shooting was Ali Agca.
But who were the principals?
What was the goal of seeing the Pontiff collapse under the blows of the gun?
Forty years later, the attack on Karol Wojtyla remains substantially not completely resolved.
The Pontiff in great suffering survives that attack and will bring the bullet to Our Lady of Fatima, which is celebrated precisely on May 13, and which, according to Wojtyla himself, saved him: "One hand fired, another hand deflected the bullet ", the Polish Pontiff himself once said. The doctors of the Gemelli Polyclinic where he was transported did not believe that Pope John Paul II could be saved from that attack. "The same doctors who performed the surgery, first of all Professor Francesco Crucitti, confessed to me - Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the historic secretary of Wojtyla recently told me - that they had taken charge of it without believing in the patient's survival". The Pope's personal physician, Dr. Renato Buzzonetti,in those tragic moments he asked Dziwisz to give the Pope the anointing of the sick. The operation lasted almost five and a half hours. It was successful. The Pope was safe.
Immediately after the attack in St. Peter's Square, Mehmet Ali Agca, the young Turk who shot the Pope, is arrested and the gun he used, a Browning, is also found.
John Paul II is still between life and death, but we are already wondering who is behind the attack: it seems unlikely that the `` Gray Wolves '', the Turkish terrorist organization of which Ali Agca is a part and that based in Bulgaria, she was able to organize the company herself On December 27, 1983, Pope Wojtyla, in the Roman prison of Rebibbia, will visit Agca and forgive him. The attacker, over the years and the various trials, has given his many versions, often contradictory and improbable to confuse public opinion as much as possible. The investigations followed the most diverse leads but 40 years after that attack there is still no certain truth. Certainly Wojtyla was 'uncomfortable' in Eastern Europe, closely tied to the Soviet Union.But evidence in this direction has never been found.
From that day there remains a bloody white shirt punctured by bullet holes. It is in the chapel of the Institute of the Daughters of Charity, in Boccea, a suburb of Rome, preserved in a reliquary. The relic survived thanks to the promptness of a nurse who was in the operating room and saw it thrown into a corner. Anna Stanghellini, as the head nurse was called, who later died in 2004, kept that 'precious' sweater in her closet for some time; then in 2000, the year of the Great Jubilee, he gave it to the sisters, with whom he had made a period of postulancy; she had chosen another path than that of the convent, but remained very attached to those nuns with whom she also chose to live in the last years of her life.