On This Day in History: May 13

The pope gets shot

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I’m not Catholic, but in spring 1981 I clearly remember thinking Why the fuck would someone want to shoot the pope? Turns out, that’s a question without a clear answer.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 13, 1981--

On May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was making an appearance in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City to a crowd of adoring fans. Except for Mehmet Ali Ağca. He was not a fan. He was armed with a 9mm pistol and shot at the pope four times, hitting him with all four rounds, two of which passed through him and hit bystanders. People in the crowd jumped on Ağca, preventing him from firing more shots. The pope survived, then got a bulletproof popemobile.

The motivation behind the attempted assassination remains a mystery.

A popular hypothesis perpetuated by right-wing media in the U.S. was that the Soviet Union was behind it, because back then American right-wingers liked blaming things on Russians, but I guess that practice changed when Trump became president. Anyway, they alleged that John Paul II, who was Polish and was supporting the Polish Solidarity movement, threatened Soviet control over the Eastern Bloc so they wanted to snuff him. The accusation was so prominent that Tom Clancy wrote a boring novel about it, but others assert there is no evidence to support this claim.

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A counterhypothesis involves Ağca’s time as part of a far-right terrorist group in Turkey called the Grey Wolves. It was alleged Ağca acted on behalf of the Grey Wolves as an assassin for hire, who were paid three million Deutsche Marks by West German intelligence to assassinate the pope and then blame it on the Soviets.

Ağca, for his part, told an endless stream of lies after his capture. Fascinated with end times, he even said he was the second coming of Christ and had co-conspirators highly placed within the Vatican who saw John Paul II as the devil.

The pope used his influence to see Ağca pardoned in 2000. He was then deported to Turkey to serve a term for murdering a left-wing journalist in 1979. Prior to his release in 2010, he converted to Roman Catholicism, which is yet another fucked up part of this whole story.

My guess? Dude was totally bugshit and already a murderer-slash-terrorist. He told multiple stories about vast conspiracies, including saying the hit was ordered by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, but I suspect he acted on his own.

Get the book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.