Agca was no stranger to violence. In 1979, he had murdered Abdi Ipekci, the editor of the Turkish newspaper Milliyet. While awaiting trial, he escaped from a military prison and vanished into a network of contacts that stretched across the Mediterranean. Using multiple aliases and forged passports, he crisscrossed Turkey, Bulgaria, and Western Europe for over a year, leaving a trail that investigators would later spend decades trying to untangle. Before the Pope's visit to Turkey in November 1979, Agca had written a letter calling John Paul II "the masked leader of the crusades" and threatening to shoot him. The visit went ahead without incident. But Agca was not bluffing -- he was preparing. He arrived in Rome by train from Milan on May 10, 1981, three days before the attack.

The moment the shots rang out, Vatican security chief Camillo Cibin lunged for the gunman. A nun and several bystanders grabbed Agca before he could flee. In the square, the Pope slumped into the arms of his personal secretary, Stanislaw Dziwisz. He was conscious and praying as the ambulance raced to Gemelli Hospital. The surgical team found a bullet had torn through his colon and small intestine, narrowly missing the central aorta. A millimeter's difference and he would have bled out before reaching the operating table. The surgery lasted over five hours. Two Americans in the crowd were also wounded. John Paul II spent twenty-two days in the hospital before returning to the Vatican, though complications from the wound would require a second surgery two months later.

Agca was sentenced to life imprisonment by an Italian court, but the question of whether he acted alone consumed intelligence agencies for years. He claimed three accomplices had been with him in Rome -- a fellow Turk and two Bulgarians -- and said the operation had been commanded by Zilo Vassilev, the Bulgarian military attache in Italy. The theory that the Soviet KGB had orchestrated the attack through Bulgarian intermediaries gained traction during the Cold War. A 2006 Italian parliamentary commission supported this claim, alleging Soviet leaders feared the Pope's support for Poland's Solidarity movement. But the evidence remained circumstantial. Bulgaria and Russia denied involvement. The Italian trial of alleged Bulgarian co-conspirators ended in acquittals. Agca himself proved an unreliable witness, alternately claiming to be Jesus Christ reincarnated and shifting his story with each telling. The full truth of who directed the attack, if anyone, has never been established.

What happened next became one of the defining images of John Paul II's papacy. On December 27, 1983, the Pope walked into Rebibbia Prison in Rome and sat across from the man who had tried to kill him. For twenty-one minutes, John Paul II spoke privately with Agca in his cell. Photographs show the Pope leaning close, holding Agca's hands as the younger man bowed his head. The Pope later said he spoke to Agca "as a brother whom I have pardoned and who has my complete trust." The act of forgiveness was not merely personal but theological -- the Pope attributed his survival to the intervention of Our Lady of Fatima, noting that the shooting had occurred on the anniversary of the first Fatima apparition. He later had the bullet that was removed from his body set into the crown of the statue of the Virgin at the Fatima shrine in Portugal.

At John Paul II's personal request, Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi pardoned Agca in June 2000. He was deported to Turkey, where he still faced sentences for the Ipekci murder and other crimes. After further imprisonment and release, Agca made a series of increasingly bizarre public statements, including declaring himself the Messiah. He visited the Vatican in 2014 to lay white roses at the Pope's tomb. John Paul II, who had died in 2005, was canonized as a saint in 2014. The popemobile in which he was riding during the attack is now displayed in the Vatican Museums, its white exterior preserved exactly as it was that afternoon. In St. Peter's Square, nothing marks the spot where the shots were fired. The space fills daily with pilgrims and tourists who stand roughly where Agca sat writing his postcards, unaware of the afternoon when four gunshots nearly ended a papacy that would reshape the Catholic Church and help bring down the Iron Curtain.