WARSAW, Poland (CNS): Pope John Paul II wrote a letter to Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca after the would-be assassin shot the pontiff at the Vatican in 1981, the pope’s former secretary said.
The pope never mailed the letter, but met with Agca nearly two years after the assassination attempt, said Polish Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz.
“This letter exists, but it has not yet been released to anyone,” Archbishop Dziwisz told Poland’s Catholic information agency, KAI.
Poland’s Rzeczpospolita daily newspaper reported on July 5 that the letter to Agca had been preserved in a collection of private notes used in Pope John Paul’s last book, Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums.
Agca shot Pope John Paul twice during a crowded general audience in St Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981. One bullet narrowly missed the pope’s aorta.
The pope forgave Agca in his first public message from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital and visited Agca in his prison cell on December 27, 1983.
Archbishop Dziwisz, who was with the pope during the assassination attempt, disclosed in June that he decided not to destroy Pope John Paul’s private notebooks, despite the request made by the pontiff in his will.
