By Charlie A. Agatep

Thirteen years ago on May 13, 1981, at 3:15pm GMT, I saw Pope John Paull II being shot as he was riding around St. Peter’s Square in his white, open jeep.

At the time of the shooting, which took place five days before the Pope’s 61st birthday anniversary, he was giving his blessing (Urbi et Orbi) and waving to a crowd of some 10,000 persons who had gathered in front of the Basilica of St. Peter’s since noon. He had just finished holding a boy in his arms inside the jeep when the shots rang out.

My late wife Mary and I were among 40 other Filipino tourists who had joined a bus tour of Europe that started in Frankfurt, Germany 11 days earlier. Ben Pangilinan (now President of the Philippine Daily Inquirer) and family were with us in the tour.

The news spread out early in the morning that the Pope would hold his weekly audience in St. Peter’s Square that afternoon. We felt that because he had just returned from a trip to the Philippines in February that year, he might find a sentimental attachment to us and extend us a special blessing.

We cancelled our scheduled tour of the city of Tivoli just 20 kilometers east of Rome and stalled for time. We revisited the Sistine Chapel and the Raphael Stanze, the Gallery or the Tapestries, the Gallery of the maps and the Pinacoteca, a marvelous collection of Renaissance and Baroque pictures.

It was about 3pm when the Pope emerged from the Basilica of St Peter’s, smiling and waving at the crowd. The passed in front of our group as we cheered and shouted “We are from the Philippines.” He noticed us, motioned the jeep driver to stop, and greeted us with a big smile, blessing us with the sign of the cross.

He was now going to make a second turn around the square in his jeep, an unusual move as we learned later. He was coming back to our group to talk to us longer, so I thought at the time. The white jeep was only a few meters from us then, when suddenly I heard three shots being fired. I saw the Pope limping forward as hundreds of doves flew from the ground, their wings flapping noisily. Visible on the Pope’s white, silk vestments were streams of blood.

I looked to my left and saw a man run to one of the many columns in the square. A plainclothes policeman jumped on him, but I thought he was just protecting the man from the crowd. The whole place was in  pandemonium now. Vatican Swiss guards in their orange and blue uniforms and civilian detectives ran in several directions.  The loud speaker over St. Peter’s Square announced that the Pope had been wounded. The voice over the loudspeaker asked the crowd to pray the Our Father and the Ave Maria with thousands in the square, we knelt to pray.

Minutes later I led Mary to the nearest taxicab and headed back to our hotel. As we opened the room TV, we saw doctors at Gemelli Policlinic, Rome’s most modern hospital, doing a surgical operation on the Pope. Hospital director Luigi Candia announced the Holy Father was undergoing surgery as he had intestinal lesions, but he was in satisfactory condition despite extensive wounds from three bullets. Thank God, we sighed.

Later that evening, the TV news reported that police had detained Nehmet Ali Hagca, a 23-year-old Turkish student at Perugia University as the prime suspect. The clean-shaven man wore gray jacket and a white shirt and looked emotionless at the TV cameras just after his arrest.

As subsequent events would show, the Pope recovered without any difficulty. Many attribute his recovery powers to his robust constitution. He like to keep fit by swimming regularly at the papal residence at Castelgandolfo. In his native Poland near Krakow,  a Polish tour guide once pointed to us the mountains where the Pope would take long walks when he was still archbishop.

The Pontiff has healthy sense of humor too. Only recently, he broke his femur bone in a freak accident in the papal bathroom. As he was wheeled to Gemelli hospital for another operation, he was reported to have told the hospital doctors: “You have to give me credit for my loyalty.”

-Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 13, 1994