The Pope on His Own Mortality
‘N 1981, three years into his papacy, Pope John Paul II was looking death in the eye. A would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, had shot him through the stomach in St. Peter’s Square.
Last week, clearly much nearer the end of that extraordinary papacy, John Paul was in the hospital again, suffering a relapse of flu-like symptoms complicated by Parkinson’s disease. Doctors performed a tracheotomy, allowing him to breathe with the aid of a tube inserted into his throat.
In a new book, the pope describes in vivid language how he experienced the 1981 shooting and its aftermath.
News articles about the book, “Memory and Identity: Conversations Between the Millenniums,” have focused on a passage in which John Paul follows mention of the Holocaust with a description of abortion as an “extermination” allowed by democratically elected parliaments.’
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