IN A memoir to be published next week, the Pope describes his attempted assassination in 1981 and his belief that divine intervention saved his life.

John Paul II recalls being taken to hospital after being shot on St Peter’s Square, but has little recollection of what happened next because “I was almost on the other side”.

In Memory and Identity, he writes: “Oh, my Lord! This was a difficult experience.

“Yes, I remember that journey to the hospital. I remained conscious for some time after. I had a feeling that I would survive. I was in pain, I had reason to be afraid, but I had this strange feeling of confidence.”

The Pope, 84, also says that he forgave Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman, even before he reached the Gemelli hospital for emergency surgery.

The book, an edited version of conversations the Pope had in 1993 with Polish friends at his summer retreat of Castelgandolfo, will be published in Italy next week, but extracts were published yesterday by the Associated Press.

The Pope says he believes that the bullet that hit him was diverted by the Virgin Mary. He was shot on May 13, the day of Our Lady of Fatima, and he donated the bullet to the shrine at Fatima in Portugal.

The shrine was built after three Portuguese shepherd children claimed that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them in 1917 and revealed three secrets. The first two related to the world wars of the 20th century and the Russian Revolution, but the third was disclosed by the Pope at Fatima only in 2000 when he said it referred to the attempt on his life.

“Agca knew how to shoot and he shot with confidence, with perfection. But it was just as if someone guided this bullet,” the Pope writes.

Later he describes his meeting with Agca in a Rome prison cell at Christmas in 1983. “We talked for a long time. Ali Agca is, as everyone says, a professional assassin. Which means that the assassination was not his initiative, that someone else thought of it, someone else gave the order.”

He does not speculate as to who that was, but observes that it was “one of the last convulsions of the 20th-century ideologies of force. Force stimulated Fascism and Hitlerism, and force also stimulated Communism.”

He says Agca became intrigued by the “secrets of Fatima”, which in turn led him to an interest in religion. The Pope adds: “Ali Agca, as I believe, understood that above his power, the power of shooting and killing, there is a greater power. He began looking for it. I wish for him that he finds it.” Agca is serving a prison sentence in Turkey, having been extradited there after serving nearly 20 years in Italy.

When the Pope was in hospital recently, Acga sent his best wishes for a full recovery.

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