The power of forgiveness: the meeting between John Paul II and the terrorist who tried to kill him

In 1983, Pope John Paul II made an extraordinary gesture of forgiveness and mercy: he visited in prison the man who tried to kill him two years earlier, Mehmet Ali Agca. The meeting lasted 21 minutes. What they talked about remains a secret between the two, but the Pope emerged from the cell saying that he had sincerely forgiven his attacker.

Mehmet Ali Agca was a Turkish terrorist, member of an ultranationalist organization called Gray Wolves, who had previously murdered a journalist in his country. He claimed to have received training in Syria and Bulgaria, and to have acted at the behest of communist forces who wanted to eliminate the Pope, a symbol of resistance to the Soviet regime in his native Poland. But he also changed his version of the facts several times, sometimes claiming to have acted alone, sometimes to have been manipulated by an international conspiracy.

The fact is that on May 13, 1981, Agca fired four shots at the Pope, who was in an open car in St. Peter's Square, in the Vatican. The Pope was seriously injured but survived. Agca was arrested and sentenced to life in prison in Italy. In 2000, he was pardoned by the Italian president, at the request of the Pope, and extradited to Turkey, where he served another ten years in prison for the murder of the journalist. He was released in 2010.

The Pope believed that Agca was a pawn in a larger plan to assassinate him, and that behind him there was “a stronger hand”. He also said that he saw the date of the attack, May 13, as a significant coincidence: it was the feast day of Our Lady of Fátima, to whom he had a special devotion. He interpreted the fact that he survived as a miracle and protection from the Virgin Mary, who would have deflected the fatal bullet.

He even donated one of the bullets that hit him to the sanctuary of Fátima, where it was placed in the crown of the saint's image.