Two days after Christmas in 1983, Pope John Paul II walked into a cell at Rebibbia prison in Rome and sat down, almost knee to knee, with Mehmet Ali Ağca, the young Turkish gunman who had shot him in St Peter's Square two and a half years earlier. The two men spoke quietly and privately. Neither ever made the whole conversation public, but the photographs of that visit became one of the best-known images of forgiveness of the twentieth century.
Here is what is known about the shooting, the prison meeting, the questions that were never fully answered, and what became of Ağca after his release.
What happened in St Peter's Square on 13 May 1981
At 5:17 in the afternoon of 13 May 1981, the pope was being driven slowly through the crowd in an open vehicle when Ağca, then 23, raised a 9mm Browning Hi-Power pistol and fired four shots. Two bullets hit John Paul II. One struck his abdomen and narrowly missed vital organs; the other wounded his left index finger. He lost a great deal of blood and underwent hours of emergency surgery.
Two women in the crowd were also hurt. Ann Odre, from Buffalo, New York, was hit in the chest, and Rose Hall was slightly wounded in the arm. Accounts that circulate online sometimes say all four bullets hit the pope, or that one of the injured women was Jamaican; the detailed record of the attack says two shots struck him and that both wounded bystanders were from the United States.
Ağca did not escape. Camillo Cibin, the head of Vatican security, a nun and several people standing nearby held him until police arrived. In July 1981 an Italian court sentenced him to life imprisonment.
The date carried extra meaning for Catholics. It was the anniversary of the first reported apparition of the Virgin Mary at Fatima in Portugal in 1917, and the pope later said he believed "a motherly hand" had guided the bullet away from death.
Who was Mehmet Ali Ağca?
Ağca was born on 9 January 1958 in Hekimhan, in the eastern Turkish province of Malatya, to a poor rural family. As a young man he was drawn into the violent politics of late-1970s Turkey and has been linked to the far-right Grey Wolves movement, although he later described himself as a mercenary with no ideology.
On 1 February 1979 he shot dead Abdi İpekçi, the editor of the respected Istanbul newspaper Milliyet. He was caught that June and given a life sentence, but escaped from a military prison in November 1979, months into his term, and made his way to Bulgaria. How a convicted killer slipped out of a guarded prison, and who paid for his travels across Europe in the following eighteen months, became central puzzles of the later investigations.
The pope's public forgiveness
Within days of the attack, while still recovering in hospital, John Paul II recorded a short message for the faithful. In it he asked Catholics to "pray for my brother [Ağca] ... whom I have sincerely forgiven." It was a striking choice of words. He did not call Ağca an enemy or a terrorist; he called him a brother.
That message mattered because it came first, before any trial, before any apology and before anyone knew whether Ağca had acted alone. In Christian teaching, forgiveness is offered freely rather than earned, and the pope was making a public example of exactly that.
Inside Rebibbia: the meeting of 27 December 1983
On 27 December 1983 John Paul II visited Rebibbia, the large prison on the edge of Rome where Ağca was serving his sentence. Vatican photographers captured the two men sitting close together on plain chairs, the pope leaning in, his hand at times resting on Ağca's arm. Some onlookers assumed he was hearing a confession; he was not.
The conversation lasted around twenty minutes, according to contemporary reports. When it ended, Ağca reportedly bent to kiss the pope's ring, a moment also caught on camera. Afterwards John Paul II told journalists only that the substance of their talk would stay between the two of them, and that he had spoken to Ağca as a brother he had pardoned.
Ağca later gave his own versions of the meeting. In one, he said he had told the pope that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the shooting; the Vatican dismissed that claim as untrue. Because Ağca's accounts have changed so many times, the honest answer is that only two people knew what was said, and one of them chose to keep it private.
The relationship did not end in that cell. The pope met Ağca's mother in 1987 and, about ten years later, his brother Muezzin. In early February 2005, as the pope's health was failing, Ağca wrote to him to wish him well. John Paul II died on 2 April 2005.
Who was behind the shooting? The unanswered question
More than four decades on, no court has established who, if anyone, sent Ağca to Rome. Several theories have been argued in public:
- The "Bulgarian connection". From the early 1980s some Western journalists argued that Soviet and Bulgarian intelligence had organised the attack. Sergei Antonov, a Bulgarian airline employee arrested largely on Ağca's word, was acquitted in 1986. Critics called the theory disinformation.
- The Mitrokhin Commission. In 2006 an Italian parliamentary commission backed the Soviet-bloc theory. Russia and Bulgaria condemned its findings, and the commission's credibility suffered when one of its informers was later arrested and charged with defamation.
- Turkish networks. Other writers pointed to Turkish ultra-nationalist circles, including the militant Abdullah Çatlı, as the organisers or helpers.
- Ağca's own claims. Over the years he blamed the Bulgarians and Soviets, then a Vatican cardinal, then Iran in a 2013 memoir, in which he said his earlier testimony had been false.
The safest reading of the evidence is that the case remains open and that Ağca, the one witness who certainly knows part of the truth, is also its least reliable source.
Pardon, prison in Turkey and life after release
In June 2000, at the pope's request, Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi pardoned Ağca after almost two decades in Italian prisons. Forgiveness did not mean freedom, though. He was sent straight to Turkey to serve time for the İpekçi murder and for two bank robberies from the 1970s.
His Turkish release was messy. He was paroled on 12 January 2006, but eight days later Turkey's Supreme Court ruled that his years in Italy could not be counted against his Turkish sentence, and he went back to prison. He was finally released on 18 January 2010, having spent nearly 29 years behind bars in the two countries. A military hospital then declared him unfit for military service, citing antisocial personality disorder.
On 27 December 2014, exactly 31 years after the prison meeting, Ağca returned to the Vatican and laid white roses on the tomb of John Paul II, who had been declared a saint that April. He asked to meet Pope Francis and was refused; Italian media reported that he was then detained and sent back to Turkey, as he did not have permission to stay in Italy. Since then he has made a string of erratic statements, including claims about the end of the world. In November 2025 Turkish authorities removed him from İznik as he tried to reach Pope Leo XIV, who was visiting the town.
What the story teaches about forgiveness
It is easy to turn this into a simple feel-good tale, but the details are more useful than the slogan. A few points stand out:
- Forgiveness and justice ran side by side. The pope forgave Ağca within days, yet Ağca still served a life sentence in Italy for almost twenty years. Letting go of hatred did not mean pretending no crime had happened.
- Forgiveness was given, not traded. The pope did not wait for an apology or a full confession of who was behind the plot. He offered it first and kept offering it, through the visit and through years of contact with Ağca's family.
- It did not require trust in the other person's story. The Vatican could forgive Ağca and still reject his later claims as false.
- It was personal. The meeting was private, and John Paul II never used its contents for publicity, even though the photographs travelled around the world.
Most of us will never face anything like a gunman in a crowded square. But the same distinction applies to everyday hurts: you can release resentment without excusing what was done, and you can keep healthy boundaries while wishing the other person well. That, more than the drama of the shooting, is why the image of a wounded pope sitting beside the man who shot him still speaks to people today.
Sources: Wikipedia: Pope John Paul II assassination attempt; Wikipedia: Mehmet Ali Ağca. Photographs of the 1983 prison visit are from Vatican press photographers.
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