TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0488> <title> 1981: "It's Like Shooting God!" </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1981 Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> May 25, 1981 WORLD "It's Like Shooting God!" </hdr> <body> Anger at a would-be assassin, prayers for a much loved Pontiff They assemble by the thousands regularly on Wednesday afternoons in St. Peter's Square; clergy and laity. Catholics and nonbelievers, pilgrims to Rome and ordinary tourists from every nation. Their common goal is to get a glimpse of the Pope, something that is far easier to do than it used to be. Papal general audiences were formerly held indoors, in St. Peter's Basilica, and the Pontiff was carried into the vast church on a portable throne called the sedia gestatoria, an aloof figure out of reach of the crowds. But John Paul II, a Pope who believes that his mission is to carry the word of God by personal contact to anyone he can touch, has changed all that. Now, whenever the weather permits, the audiences are held outdoors in the square. Tickets, given out free by the Vatican as long as the supply lasts, are still needed by those who wish to occupy the rows of chairs and benches set up in front of the central obelisk facing the basilica. Large areas of the immense 20-acre square, however, are left open for anyone who can jam in through the encircling Bernini colonnade that the architect likened to arms of the church reaching out in love to embrace the world. Under a spring sun that warmed the air to 66 degrees F, a crowd of perhaps 15,000 turned out last Wednesday. It was a typical gathering: a multinational, multiracial group of waterworks officials attending a convention in Rome; Poles from St. Florian parish in Cracow, where the former Karol Cardinal Wojtyla had once been an assistant parish priest; cycling clubs form northern Italy with their bicycles; parochial school children from the U.S. shepherded by nuns; the ubiquitous Japanese tourists, cameras ever at the ready. At exactly 5 p.m., Pope John Paul II entered the square through the Arch of Bells, standing in his open-top, Jeep-like campagnola, which reporters have dubbed the Popemobile. The Pontiff appeared relaxed and joyous. A mile and a half away, in the Piazza del Popolo, a rally organized by Italian political parties, ranging from left to center, was gathering to denounce an antiabortion proposal, strongly supported by John Paul, that was to be submitted to Italy's voters in a few days. But in St. Peter's Square, the throng was swept by the emotion that John Paul inspires in almost all who see him in person; simple friendliness. In every one of the 21 countries on five continents that the Pope has visited in his 2 1/2 years in office, huge crowds have responded eagerly and spontaneously to his informality and delight in human contact. So it was as the Popemobile circled St. Peter's Square through a narrow lane formed by low wooden barricades. The crowd cheered and waved white-and-gold papal flags. In the speech that was to conclude the audience, the Pope intended to revert to one of his consistent themes; the duty of the rich to help the poor. John Paul was commemorating the 90th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's pioneering social encyclical Rerum Novarum: the draft of speech, which as usual John Paul had written himself, asserted that the encyclical "was not only a vigorous condemnation of the undeserved misery of working conditions of that time, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, but above all, laid the foundation for a just solution to the problems of human coexistence, which go under the name of `social problems.'" John Paul's conclusion: the Roman Catholic Church insisted that "great profits had to be placed at the service of the common good." In the moments leading up to the speech, the Pope was reaching out to the crowd. He swept babies into his brawny grasp and kissed them, touched outstretched hands, extended his arms in blessing. At 5:19 p.m., the Popemobile had nearly completed its second and final circuit of the square. John Paul had picked up and held high a little girl, her blond hair tousled as he hugged her. After he put her down, recalls Pietro Volpicelli, an onlooker who was standing only 10 ft. away, the Pope was leaning out of his car and "giving his hand to a girl dressed in white." The shots rang out. Three, perhaps four or more; no one could be positive. But the crowd knew instantly what had happened. Witness after witness was to liken the noise to the "popping of a string of firecrackers,"--a description made so familiar by assassinations and attempted assassinations that it is now repeated instinctively. A woman who had been standing near the Pope told a reporter confidently: "It was a Browning 9." She had heard the sound of shots many times in her native Northern Ireland, to whose warring factions the Pope in September 1979 had made an impassioned but vain plea, "on my knees," for an end to violence. The Pope stood immobile for an instant. Then he collapsed backward into the arms of his personal secretary, Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz. The Pope looked at his hands, one of which was bloodied. Bright red blood began to spurt from his abdomen onto his gleaming white cassock. Francesco Passanisi, inspector general of the Vatican police, who had been following close behind the campagnola, leaped aboard and ordered the driver to "move back and forth," presenting a blurred target for any further shots. Recalled Passanisi later: "As I was supporting the Pope, he was saying `Thank you, thank you.' And he repeated that I should not worry." After a few seconds of evasive action, when it became clear there would be no more shots, the Popemobile moved off as rapidly as its small engine could drive it through the Arch of Bells to an ambulance that is always parked near papal appearances. Attendants followed standing emergency orders; to take the Pope not to Holy Spirit Hospital, one of the largest in Rome, which is just around the corner from the Vatican, but to the Gemelli hospital, on the outskirts of the city, a little more than two miles away. Reason: Gemelli, a Catholic hospital supervised by a board of bishops, is reputed to be Rome's best medical facility, with the most modern equipment and highly skilled doctors. On the 20-min. drive to Gemelli, John Paul, bleeding profusely, softly murmured "Madonna, Madonna" in Polish. As the ambulance pulled up to the emergency entrance, an attendant jumped out and shouted to stunned doctors and nurses: "It's the Pope! It's the Pope!" John Paul was wheeled swiftly to the intensive care unit, given a blood transfusion and taken to the ninth-floor surgical clinic. As he was being moved into surgery, the Pope, fully conscious, posed to a male nurse the question that recurs with such dreadful frequency amid the mindless violence that grips the world: "Perche I'hanno fatto [Why did they do it]?" John Paul was not hinting that he had seen more than one would-be assassin but simply wondering at the madness of them all. The Pope had apparently been hit by two bullets, fired from only a few yards away. One shattered the two joints of the ring finger of his left hand, ricocheted and grazed his right arm. The other blasted into his abdomen, passing completely through his body and ripping up the Pope's intestines but narrowly missing his pancreas, abdominal aorta and spine. For 5 hr. 25 min., as rumors flew around the world and hospital patients in bathrobes mingled with Italian dignitaries and journalists to exchanged shocked speculation, surgeons labored to take out several pieces of the Pope's intestine and perform a colostomy, which would remove wastes outside his body. Giancario Castiglioni, chief of surgery at the hospital, flew back from Milan to join the surgical team halfway through the operation. At length Castiglioni emerged to brief reporters. He was still wearing his green gown; his eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion. In a barely audible voice, he announced: "The prognosis is reserved [because of the danger of infection], but there is hope that the Pope will recover and stay with us." He turned aside detailed questions on the ground that they delved into "delicate matters." Back in St. Peter's Square, pandemonium reigned. As the Pope collapsed, two women who had been standing near his car also fell, hit by bullets intended for John Paul. They were rushed to Holy Spirit Hospital. Both were Americans, Rose Hall, 21, originally from Shirley, Mass., and now married to a Protestant missionary posted in Wurzburg, West Germany, had her left arm broken by a slug. Ann Odre 58, a widow from Buffalo and a devout Catholic who had just realized her longtime dream of seeing the Pope, was hit by a bullet that lodged in her abdomen. At week's end she was in serious condition after a long operation to remove her spleen. Some people in the crowd had noticed a slender, swarthy young man arguing with a group of pilgrims lining the low wooden barricades along the Popemobile's lane; he seemed to be telling them that they were blocking him from getting close to the Pontiff. As the Pope's vehicle drew near the spot, the man suddenly burst through the crowd. A photographer caught the picture that froze the following moment of horror: a gun poking out of the forest of outstretched hands waving at John Paul. Immediately after the shots, witnesses who were only a few feet away told TIME, the young man edged out of he crowd; his face was tense, and his extended arm still held the gun. He almost backed into a first-aid trailer parked near the scene, then turned around and ran toward the columns and the streets of Rome. But he was spotted almost immediately and chased by Vatican plainclothes security guards and numerous members of the crowd. The gunman darted behind an ambulance (not the one to be used by John Paul) parked near the columns. When he reappeared he was held in a tight headlock by a tall, blond plainclothesman and surrounded by five or six others who hustled him through the throng. Had he not been seized by the plainclothesmen, he would surely have been trapped and held by the shocked and outraged crowd. Said one bystander who gave chase: "We would not have left even the buttons on his coat." The captured man was taken first to the Commissariato Borgo, the Vatican police headquarters. But the Vatican has only religious courts; under the terms of the 1929 agreement with Italy that recognized Vatican City as an independent state, crimes committed on its 109-acre territory are prosecuted by the Italian government. The gunman was quickly bundled into an armored car and driven to central police headquarters in downtown Rome. During twelve hours of almost uninterrupted interrogation conducted at a small table in a bare-walled chamber, the gunman's identity emerged. He was Mehmet Ali Agca, a 23-year-old Turk, a convicted murderer and a jail breaker. In the words of Alfredo Lazzarini, head of the Rome police antiterrorist squad, Agca was also "a terrorist with a capital T." He was considered so dangerous that Turkish police had been given orders to shoot him on sight. Agca had shot and killed the editor of a liberal newspaper in early 1979 in Istanbul. Sentenced to death, he escaped from a maximum-security prison, leaving behind a note threatening to kill John Paul II ("the masked leader of the Crusades"), who was about to visit Turkey, Lazzarini described him as "cold, lucid" under interrogation, but his motives were a muddle; he called himself a "pro-Palestinian Communist comrade," but he had belonged to a neofascist organization in Turkey nicknamed the "Gray Wolves." Police found a note in Turkish in his pocket saying: "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 El Salvador and Afghanistan." The only thing that seemed completely clear about his mind was the intensity of the hate it harbored. None of that was known to the stunned crowd in St. Peter's Square. Those near the scene of the shooting traded horrified speculation: the gunman was an Arab, a South American, an agent of the Soviet K.G.B. Some people on the far side of the square did not even realize what had happened. But then, as the Pope's ambulance was speeding away, loudspeakers that were to have amplified his talk announced over and over, in Italian, French, English and a variety of other languages (including Chinese): "The Holy Father has been wounded. We will now offer prayers for him, for his speedy recovery." People dropped to their knees, many weeping. A group of 450 Poles, some wearing the buttons of Solidarity, the independent labor union, sang hymns in their--and John Paul's--native language. An hour after the shooting, Monsignor Justin Rigali, who translates John Paul's words into English at papal audiences, stepped to the microphone to announce: "We have just heard some good news on the radio. The Pope was not wounded in any vital organs, so the gravity seems to have waned." Only then did the crowd begin to disperse. By nightfall the lone remaining signs of its presence were gifts left by sorrowing pilgrims on the empty gilt chair from which John Paul would have addressed his flock; flowers, embroidery, a portrait of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa placed there by the Poles. By then the news had long since burst on the world, which discovered that it is not so inured to such terrorism and violence as it may have thought. True enough, attempted assassinations of public figures have become so commonplace that many draw the little attention. Threats and even close calls are routine. In February a grenade exploded in a stadium in Karachi, Pakistan, 20 min. before John Paul entered; the headlines were modest. But that the Pope should actually be hit and wounded--that still had a unique capacity to stun. The outpouring of anger, outrage and sympathy for the fallen Pontiff was all but universal--far more extensive than it had been for Ronald Reagan six weeks before. Explained Amos Barak, a young Jewish businessman in Jerusalem: "Shooting presidents, that's politics, that I can understand. But shooting the Pope--it's like shooting God!" The reaction of world leaders went far beyond the official statements of condolences that their aides have become so unhappily adept at phrasing. Said Reagan: "I'll pray for him." Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev cabled the Pope: "I am profoundly indignant at the criminal attempt on your life." Dismayed West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt exclaimed: "I feel I've been hit in the abdomen myself!" Outgoing French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who escaped a terrorist bomb in Corsica last month, sent a wire to the Vatican expressing "profound emotion," and he obviously did not exaggerate his feelings. An associate who was conferring with Giscard when the news came reported that the French President, who is noted for his icy reserve, experienced "an enormous shock." Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told reporters: "I am too shocked for words. What more can I say?" Throughout the world, Catholics flocked to churches to pray at special services for the Pope. At one such ceremony, in London's Westminster Cathedral, Basil Cardinal Hume delivered what may have been the most telling tribute to the Pontiff. Said Hume: "He is now at one with the countless victims of violence of our day. He, like them, has now followed in the footsteps of a Master who was himself so cruelly and callously tortured and killed. He, like his master, refuses to condemn, is ready to forgive." The grief was perhaps greatest in Poland. John Paul has been an inspirational force to his overwhelmingly Catholic fellow countrymen, who are struggling to liberalize their nation's Communist system without plunging it into anarchy. Acutely aware of the Pope's influence, Party Boss Stanislaw Kania, President Henryk Jablonski and Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski joined in a telegram wishing him a speedy recovery "so indispensable to fulfilling your mission in the service of the humanistic ideals of peace and the welfare of mankind." Ordinarily Poles poured out their feelings; postal authorities reported that half of all the telegrams dispatched in Poland Wednesday night were get-well messages to the Pope. Those who crowded into St. John's Cathedral in Warsaw for special services were startled to hear a tape-recorded message from their country's primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, 79, who is said to be dying of cancer. In a strained voice he declared: "I am afflicted by various ailments, but they are nothing compared with the sufferings inflicted on the head of the church." John Paul's travels have made him a familiar personality in every corner of the world, a beloved figure to many humble people who have seen no other celebrated name in the flesh. In Mexico, which the Pope visited in early 1979 on the first foreign tour of his pontificate, Ingracia Lopez, 78, who had sat in the front row at one of the Pontiff's Masses, mourned: "He has such a great affinity for all Mexicans, such charisma, such heart. This shooting is an act of insolence." Brazilians, whom the Pope visited for twelve days last summer, referred to him in prayers as "John of God." In one dreary shanty town, where John Paul left his gold Cardinal's ring as a donation to the local church, a parishioner called him simply "the best man on earth." By week's end the pall of shock and fear had begun to lift slightly. The Pope improved enough the day after the shooting to take Communion at a Mass said in his room by Monsignor Dziwisz, receive brief visits from some Vatican prelates and speak to his doctors. Carlo Cardinal Confalonieri, the Dean of the College of Cardinals and one of John Paul's visitors, reported that the Pope has "no resentment in him, but complete forgiveness toward" his would-be killer. Francesco Crucitti, a surgeon at the Gemelli hospital, said he had asked the Pontiff whether his pain had diminished. John Paul had replied: "I am hoping." Other doctors described the Pope as "a little depressed" and running a slight fever. On Friday he began moving his arms and legs in physical therapy exercises and felt more cheerful. But because of the danger of infection following any such grave abdominal wound, the next few days will be critical. The most John Paul's doctors would permit themselves to say was that "nothing has gone wrong so far." Meanwhile, police were trying to determine whether Agca had any accomplices, despite his insistence that he had acted alone. The gunman was formally charged with attempted murder of the Pope and of the two women who were wounded in the attack. If convicted, Agca could be sentenced to life imprisonment. He apparently will not be extradited to Turkey: an international treaty that has been signed by both countries exempts criminals from extradition to a country where they would face a more severe penalty (in this case, the penalty would be death) than in the nation where they are captured. The world was left searching for new ways to express shock, grief, horror, apprehension. By now the words have all been said--again, and again, and again. But they acquired new poignancy last week. Of the millions of expressions of sorrow, non exceeded in directness and simplicity the cry of sobbing woman in Madrid: "The world has gone mad!" -- By George J. Church. Reported by Roland Flamini and Barry Kalb/Rome </body> </article> </text>