John Paul Writes of Near-Death Experience After 1981 Shooting

Felled by a would-be assassin’s bullet, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church lay close to death as he was rushed to a hospital. Floating near unconsciousness, Pope John Paul II forgave his attacker, yet somehow remained confident that he would live.

“Oh, my God! It was a difficult experience,” the pope recalled.

Finally passing out in the hospital as doctors frantically gave him blood, he nearly died: “I was practically on the other side,” John Paul said.

These are some of the most personal, emotional passages from a new book by the pope, due to be released today, in which he writes for the first time about his feelings in the hours after the May 13, 1981, assassination attempt. A Turkish gunman shot John Paul as he rode in an open car through St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.

The 227-page book, “Memory and Identity,” is the fifth and latest in this prolific pope’s repertoire, and its Italian publisher, Rizzoli, expects to release English and other translations soon.

In addition to the recollections about his brush with death, the pope uses the book to extol the intervention of the Virgin Mary, condemn the 20th century ideologies of Nazism and communism, ruminate on the struggle between good and evil and recount conversations with the man who tried to kill him.

Already, the book has generated controversy because of references in which the pope likens abortion to the Holocaust -- two evils that, in his view, negate God’s law.

In a news conference here Tuesday to present the book, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said the pope did not intend to minimize the Nazi “system” by comparing it to abortion. The pope was simply speaking of both as forms of the “violent destruction of human life,” Ratzinger said.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany said the comparison shows that “the Catholic Church does not understand or does not want to understand that there is an enormous difference between mass genocide and what women do with their bodies,” according to Agence France-Presse.

The pope did not attend Tuesday’s presentation, which was held in the ornate Colonna Palace in a salon decorated with chandeliers, marble columns and 16th century oil paintings. He was in his Vatican quarters, receiving his first foreign visitor, the prime minister of Croatia, since the pope fell ill and was rushed to a hospital Feb. 1.

Vatican officials say the long-suffering pope has recovered from the flu and breathing complications, but he will forgo his weekly audience today and has only gradually been easing back into his schedule.

“The pope is better and the pope is getting better,” spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said after the book presentation.

Portions of the book were released ahead of schedule last week in the pope’s native Poland. The work is a compilation of conversations the pope had in 1993 with two close Polish friends, the late Rev. Jozef Tischner and political philosopher Krzysztof Michalski.

In the epilogue, titled “Someone Guided the Bullet,” his companions ask the pope about the shooting. He reiterates his belief that divine intervention caused the bullet to avoid his vital organs.

The pope says he remembers the rush to the hospital.

“For some time I remained conscious,” he says. “I had a feeling I was going to survive. I suffered, and that was a reason for fear, but I had this strange feeling of confidence.”

John Paul told his trusted secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was with him when he was shot, that he forgave the would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca. Two years later, at Christmas, the pope visited Agca in a Rome prison. During a long conversation, the pope recounts, the gunman seemed mystified that he had failed to kill his prey.

“As everyone says, [Agca] is a professional killer, which means that the assassination was not his initiative, that someone else thought of it, someone told him to do it,” the pope writes.

“Throughout the entire conversation it was clear that Ali Agca was burdened by a question: How did it happen that the assassination failed? After all, he did everything that needed to be done, he took care of even the smallest details of his plan. Yet the victim avoided death. How could this happen?”

The anxiety led Agca to wonder about the mystery of Fatima, the city in Portugal where Catholics believe the Virgin Mary appeared to three children in 1917 and made several predictions, including one that purportedly foretold the assassination attempt. The pope, after surviving, traveled to Fatima to thank Mary for saving his life.

The pope writes that Agca’s confusion led the gunman to understand that a higher power could govern even his actions.

As part of a global struggle between good and evil, John Paul writes, the assassination was “one of the last convulsions of 20th century ideologies of violence,” such as fascism and Nazism.

Special correspondent Ela Kasprzycka in Warsaw contributed to this report.