1920–2005
○ Natural causes
A global pope from behind the Iron Curtain
“Let your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth!” he appealed in Warsaw.
Karol Józef Wojtyła was a Polish priest and philosopher who was elected John Paul II in 1978 and led the Catholic Church until 2005. Having lived through Nazi occupation and state socialism, he made human dignity, religious freedom, and national memory central to his pastoral and political language. About 11 million people saw him during his 1979 pilgrimage to Poland, helping a society dispersed under communist rule recognize itself as a community. He was an important factor in creating the conditions for Solidarity, while the movement’s workers and political actors remained its own agents.
Activities and affiliations
- 1946–2005 Religion
- 1978–2005 Government and administration
Career Timeline
- 1946Ordained priest of the Archdiocese of Kraków
- 1958Auxiliary Bishop of Kraków
- 1964Archbishop of Kraków
- 1967Made a cardinal
- 1978Elected the 264th pope, John Paul II
- 1979First papal pilgrimage to Poland
- 1980Witnessed the emergence of the Solidarity movement
- 2005Died in office
Related historical events
The 1981 assassination attempt and its aftermath
On 13 May 1981, while welcoming pilgrims in St. Peter's Square, John Paul II was shot and critically wounded by Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turkish gunman and member of the militant fascist Grey Wolves. Ağca used a Browning 9 mm pistol, wounding the pope in the abdomen and perforating his colon and small intestine. The pope was rushed to Gemelli Hospital and underwent five hours of surgery; the two bullets missed his superior mesenteric artery and abdominal aorta, but he lost nearly three-quarters of his blood. Ağca was seized at the scene and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Two days after Christmas in 1983, the pope visited Ağca in prison, where the two spoke privately for about twenty minutes. John Paul II said that what they discussed would remain a secret between them and that he had met him as a brother he had pardoned, an act often cited as the practical expression of the language of forgiveness he stressed throughout his pontificate.
Responsibility for ordering the attack was never established. The claim that the Soviet Union ordered it in retaliation for the pope's support of Solidarity, with Bulgarian security services used to shield that role, was pushed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency at the time but never substantiated by evidence; the 2006 Italian Mitrokhin Commission concluded that Soviet military intelligence, not the KGB, was responsible. Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service rejected the accusation, and the pope himself stated publicly during a 2002 visit to Bulgaria that the country's then leadership had nothing to do with the attempt. His secretary, Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, nonetheless wrote that the pope privately believed the Soviet Union was behind it. What the sources leave unproven remains an allegation.