At 5:19 p.m. on 13 May 1981 — the feast of Our Lady of Fátima and the sixty-fourth anniversary of the first apparition to the three shepherd children — Pope John Paul II was making his customary general-audience circuit of St. Peter's Square in the open white popemobile. As he leaned to bless a child, a Turkish gunman named Mehmet Ali Ağca fired four rounds from a 9 mm Browning at close range from the crowd. Two struck the Pope: one grazed his left index finger and arm, the other entered his abdomen, missing the mesenteric artery, the spinal column and the central aorta by narrow margins. The other two rounds wounded two women in the crowd, an American and a Jamaican.
The Pope was rushed to the Gemelli Hospital, where five hours of surgery under Professor Francesco Crucitti saved his life. During his convalescence he asked to read the Third Secret of Fátima, sealed in the Vatican archives since 1957; reading it, he became convinced that the Virgin of Fátima had deflected the bullet from a mortal path, and later said publicly: 'One hand fired, and another guided the bullet.' He visited Ağca in his Roman prison cell on 27 December 1983 and forgave him personally.
On 13 May 1982, a year to the day after the shooting, John Paul II went to Fátima in thanksgiving and offered the bullet extracted from his body to Our Lady; on 26 April 1989 it was set into the crown of the statue of Our Lady of Fátima in the Chapel of the Apparitions, where it remains. On 25 March 1984, the feast of the Annunciation, he consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary at St. Peter's in union with the bishops of the world; Sister Lúcia dos Santos, still alive at Coimbra, later confirmed to Cardinal Bertone that this consecration fulfilled the Virgin's 1929 request at Tuy. On the feast of Our Lady of Fátima in 2000 the Holy See announced the release of the Third Secret, whose figure of a 'bishop dressed in white' falling under gunfire Sister Lúcia and the Holy See read as the attempt of 1981.