I was seventeen years old. My grandmother was born in Italy and had always wanted to go back. Just weeks after her husband, my grandfather died, she decided it was time. He never wanted to fly and she had long since given up on trying to drag him along. This was her chance and I’d be her guest. A three and a half week tour of the homeland.

The Pope gave an audience in St. Peter’s square every Wednesday and we of course had tickets. My grandmother, a member of Northeast Minneapolis’ aristocracy of restaurateurs, must also have had connections within The Vatican. Our seats were only a few rows back from where his holiness would sit, once the Popemobile made it’s customary circuit around the interior of the square, packed with hundreds of thousands of cheering believers and tourists. Little did we know it was this day in May 1981 that Pope John Paul II would not address the animated crowd.

The Pope entered the square off in a corner, far from our post. We caught brief glimpses of his white robe and matching (and then unprotected) Jeep through the crowd. We otherwise followed him audibly as the cheers rose and fell as he traveled counter clockwise under a beautiful blue sky, through the outer bounds of the open air square, framed by rows of aged, towering and historic white columns.

I would guess he was about three quarters through his route, behind the columns in the round section of the keyhole-shaped space when the pigeons rose into the air, startled by something beyond our perception. The look on my grandmothers face conveyed her immediate concern.

Seconds later we heard the delayed pop of one of what we would learn later was a quick salvo of five shots, the other four muffled by closely packed onlookers. It sounded like a firecracker. At first we thought it was a prank, maybe someone had smuggled one into the square. It was the distant, ominous wail of women and children screaming that informed us something much more serious was afoot.

Mr. Agca shot the pope on May 13, 1981, in St. Peter’s Square, wounding him in the stomach, left hand and right arm.

The haunting sound grew in volume as the crowd became informed exponentially and traveled ominously from the point of impact to my distant perch as I stood on my chair, a typical teen-aged stance. From my vantage point I was startled to see a subsequent wave approaching through the throngs as the crowd instinctively dropped to their knees in prayer for their fallen magnate. I stood on my chair, alone, as everyone else around me fell to the bricks until just behind me, a priest, in Italian but clearly in disgust, scolded me while he horse-collared me to the ground, and implored me to pray as well.

Two years later, the Pope visited Mr. Agca in a an Italian prison and offered forgiveness.

Which is how long it seemed to take to get out of St. Peter’s square as sobbing Christians, uninformed as to their beloved Pope’s prognosis, made their way to the exits under the constant buzzing of helicopters overhead and caribinieri straining to secure and clear the area.

We made it back to our flat in Rome where the magnitude of what we had witnessed was revealed by worldwide television coverage of what would be one of the biggest global news events that year. We were glued to the screen as if we had been a thousand miles away. The fact that it had been a few hundred feet wouldn’t sink in until we were back home, weeks later.

The phone rang that night at two or three in the morning and we heard our host, a distant cousin, in Italian, clearly irritated by the disruption. It was when I heard him call out “Giovani! Telefono!” that I knew, curiously, the call was for me.

KSTP News was on the other end of the crackling line. Reporters had discovered we were the only Minnesotan’s in the square that day and they wanted an interview. I would find out later from my friends back home that my account of the incident was actually live on the air. It was probably better that I didn’t know it at the time.

The next three weeks of our trip was of course relatively uneventful as we visited the rest of Rome, touring Naples, Florence and Venice as well as the childhood home of my grandmother, reduced to remnants of a foundation by wars and the passage of time.

Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish man who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981, was released from a Turkish prison on Monday proclaiming that he was “the Christ eternal” after serving jail terms totaling 29 years.

Pope John Paul II miraculously recovered, forgave his would-be assassin, and served for over twenty more years. My grandmother passed away a few years after our pilgrimage.  I am grateful she chose me to accompany her on her last and only journey back to her home town.

This entry was posted by by Johnny Roosh on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 10:32 am and is filed under Faiths And Their Followers, History And Its Making, Johnny Roosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.