TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/81/81.26

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 20KB | 372 lines

                                                                                May 25, 1981

WORLD

"It's Like Shooting God!"


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 form 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 it 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