remained comfortable in the persuasion that the shift from the old internationalism to a more truly geopolitical globalism would be a gradual affair: that it would come on the long finger of slow and laborious historical changes. He presumed that as the gradual changes he was sowing within the geopolitics of power would bear more and more fruit, so too the preeminence of the geopolitics of faith would emerge.
Nothing short of the rudest shock of ultimate realityâof life and death and the inescapable will of Godâwould change that mind-set.
At a certain moment on May 15, 1981, during an open-air papal audience in St. Peterâs Square, in the presence of some 75,000 people and before the eyes of an estimated 11 million television viewers, Pope John Paul spied a little girl wearing a small picture of Christâs mother as Our Lady of Fatima. Just as he bent from his slow-moving âpopemobileâ in a spontaneous gesture toward the child, hired assassin Mehmet Ali Agea squeezed off two bullets, aimed precisely where his head had been. As two pilgrims fell wounded to the ground, two more shots rang out, and this time John Paulâs blood stained his white papal cassock.
Robust though he was, it took six months of painful convalescence for the Pope to recover. During that time he had the strength and the nobility of soul to receive in private audience the sorrowing mother of his Turkish assassin-designate. Motivated by the love of Christ, and by that ancient principle of powerful men to âknow thine enemy,â he also went to see Ali Agca in his prison cell. In quasi-confessional intimacy, John Paul talked with the man who knew the enemy who had commissioned so grisly a desecration.
The attempted assassination of John Paul shocked the world as a planned act of high sacrilege. In its immediate intent, however, that mostvile act had no religious significance. For it was an act committed against the Pope not as a religious leader but as a geopolitician well along on the highroad of success. The wrath that had boiled up in homicidal anger, and that by the remotest and most covert control had guided the actions of Ali Agea on that day, was the wrath of important hegemonic interests separated from St. Peterâs Square by huge distances of land and water. Interests unwilling to see this Pope reintroduce the Holy See as an independent and uncontrollable force in international affairs.
Already John Paulâs successes in Poland had jiggered alliances presumed to have been inviolable. As he had widened the ambit of his attention and his energies, he had consistently shown himself to be a leader capable of carrying out his intention to shape events, and to determine the success or failure of secular policies for the new world order. He had not opened the new game of nations by chance, as some had originally thought. He was not some papal Alice who had carelessly fallen down a geopolitical rabbit hole and then wondered where he had landed. He was a purposeful contender for power, who cast a shadow that already blocked the light of success from the eyes of some with diametrically opposed plans for the geopolitical future of the society of nations. Better, then, to cut that shadow down to the abject shades of death in the noonday glare of the Italian sun.
Given the fact that the attempt to murder him was itself a badge of his geopolitical success, there was no earthly reason to expect John Paul to change his vision of the new world order or his agenda to influence it. It was not lost on him, however, that the attempt on his life had taken place on May 13. Or that a series of very curious supernatural eventsâevents of intimate interest to the papacyâhad begun on May 13, 1917, in the obscure Portuguese hamlet of Fatima, and had ended there on October 13 of the same year with a miracle centered on the Virgin Mary and her apparent power to control the sun in spectacular ways. Nor, finally, was it lost
Nothing short of the rudest shock of ultimate realityâof life and death and the inescapable will of Godâwould change that mind-set.
At a certain moment on May 15, 1981, during an open-air papal audience in St. Peterâs Square, in the presence of some 75,000 people and before the eyes of an estimated 11 million television viewers, Pope John Paul spied a little girl wearing a small picture of Christâs mother as Our Lady of Fatima. Just as he bent from his slow-moving âpopemobileâ in a spontaneous gesture toward the child, hired assassin Mehmet Ali Agea squeezed off two bullets, aimed precisely where his head had been. As two pilgrims fell wounded to the ground, two more shots rang out, and this time John Paulâs blood stained his white papal cassock.
Robust though he was, it took six months of painful convalescence for the Pope to recover. During that time he had the strength and the nobility of soul to receive in private audience the sorrowing mother of his Turkish assassin-designate. Motivated by the love of Christ, and by that ancient principle of powerful men to âknow thine enemy,â he also went to see Ali Agca in his prison cell. In quasi-confessional intimacy, John Paul talked with the man who knew the enemy who had commissioned so grisly a desecration.
The attempted assassination of John Paul shocked the world as a planned act of high sacrilege. In its immediate intent, however, that mostvile act had no religious significance. For it was an act committed against the Pope not as a religious leader but as a geopolitician well along on the highroad of success. The wrath that had boiled up in homicidal anger, and that by the remotest and most covert control had guided the actions of Ali Agea on that day, was the wrath of important hegemonic interests separated from St. Peterâs Square by huge distances of land and water. Interests unwilling to see this Pope reintroduce the Holy See as an independent and uncontrollable force in international affairs.
Already John Paulâs successes in Poland had jiggered alliances presumed to have been inviolable. As he had widened the ambit of his attention and his energies, he had consistently shown himself to be a leader capable of carrying out his intention to shape events, and to determine the success or failure of secular policies for the new world order. He had not opened the new game of nations by chance, as some had originally thought. He was not some papal Alice who had carelessly fallen down a geopolitical rabbit hole and then wondered where he had landed. He was a purposeful contender for power, who cast a shadow that already blocked the light of success from the eyes of some with diametrically opposed plans for the geopolitical future of the society of nations. Better, then, to cut that shadow down to the abject shades of death in the noonday glare of the Italian sun.
Given the fact that the attempt to murder him was itself a badge of his geopolitical success, there was no earthly reason to expect John Paul to change his vision of the new world order or his agenda to influence it. It was not lost on him, however, that the attempt on his life had taken place on May 13. Or that a series of very curious supernatural eventsâevents of intimate interest to the papacyâhad begun on May 13, 1917, in the obscure Portuguese hamlet of Fatima, and had ended there on October 13 of the same year with a miracle centered on the Virgin Mary and her apparent power to control the sun in spectacular ways. Nor, finally, was it lost
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