Paul Ⅱ in Rome

When in Rome the pope stopped to pray for the President’s recovery and immediately sent him a personal message with his prayers and hopes.

These were worrisome times. It had not been so long before, during a Vatican meeting with an aide to the pope’s secretary of state, that William Casey left with a final word of caution.

The CIA station in Rome had passed along a curious, and perhaps important, piece of information. When Lech Walesa had visited the pope, his host had been a man from the Italian Labour Confederation. The CIA had been told by Italian counter-intelligence officials that the host was working for Bulgaria. Since Bulgarians were under the control of the Soviets, this could either mean that Solidarity’s plans were compromised or that Walesa was in danger.

On May 13, 1981, at 5 pm, the pontiff emerged for his weekly general audience in St, Peter’s Square. After entering the open “popemobile”,the pontiff was riding around the colonnade. His aide Stanislaw Dziwisz was next to him.

Suddenly Dziwisz heard a deafening noise, and pigeons all over the square took flight. Then the pope slumped against him.

“I knew the Holy Father was hit”, Dziwisz says “but there was no sign of blood or a wound on him . Then I asked him. ‘Where?’ he replied, ‘In my stomach.’”

The pope had been wounded in his stomach, right elbow and index finger of his left hand. He was transferred to an ambulance, which sped him to a hospital.

“Mary, my mother! Mary, my mother!” the Holy Father kept repeating. His eyes were closed, and he was in great pain, At the Gemelli Clinic the pope was rushed first to a tenth-floor room reserved for a papal emergency and then to an operating room. He’d lost a great deal of blood, and because his condition was critical, last rites were administered.

The operation lasted five hours and 20 minutes. Twenty two inches of John Paul Ⅱ’s intestine were removed. “Hope gradually returned during the operation.” Said Dziwisz. “It became clear that no vital organ had been hit and that he just might survive.”

Like the bullet that almost killed Ronald Reagan, this one had passed a few millimeters from the aorta. “If it had hit, death would have been instantaneous,” Dziwisz observed. “It did not touch any vital point. It was really miraculous.”liuxuepaper.com