A Life with Karol: My Forty-Year Friendship with the Man Who Became Pope by Dziwisz Cardinal Stanislaw

Author:Dziwisz, Cardinal Stanislaw [Dziwisz, Cardinal Stanislaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2008-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

20.

But Who Armed the Killer?

“So why aren’t you dead?” Mehmet Ali Agca asked.

That was a question John Paul II wasn’t expecting to hear.

The Pope had decided to meet face-to-face with the man who tried to kill him. He wanted to repeat his words of forgiveness to his would-be killer in person. And he also wanted to give some meaning—a meaning Ali Agca could understand—to the gesture of Christian love he was performing. The first thing he said was, “Today we meet as men. No, as brothers.”

But as he sat next to Ali Agca in a bare cell in the Rebibbia prison, inclining his head to hear the prisoner better, the Pope was surprised to hear the question: “So why aren’t you dead?”

Perhaps Karol Wojtyla was also hoping that this meeting would help him understand why the man sitting next to him had tried to kill him. What he got instead was this strange question: “I know I was aiming right. I know that the bullet was a killer. So why aren’t you dead?”

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