Felled by a would-be assassin's bullet, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church lay close to death as he was rushed to a hospital. Floating near unconsciousness, Pope John Paul II forgave his attacker yet somehow remained confident he would live.
"Oh, my God! It was a difficult experience," the pope recalled.
Finally passing out in the hospital as doctors frantically gave him blood, he nearly died: "I was practically on the other side," he said.
These are some of the most personal, emotional passages from a new book by the pope, due to be released today, in which he writes for the first time about his feelings in the hours after the May 13, 1981, assassination attempt. A Turkish gunman shot John Paul as he rode in an open car through St. Peter's Square at the Vatican.
The 227-page book, "Memory and Identity," is the fifth and latest in this prolific pope's repertoire, and its Italian publisher, Rizzoli, expects to release English and other translations soon.
The pope did not attend yesterday's presentation, which was held in the ornate Colonna Palace in a salon decorated with chandeliers, marble columns and 16th-century oil paintings. He was in his Vatican quarters instead, receiving his first foreign visitor — the prime minister of Croatia — since he fell ill and was rushed to the hospital Feb. 1.
Vatican officials say the pope has recovered from the flu and breathing complications, but he will forgo his weekly audience today and has only gradually been easing back into his schedule.
"The pope is better and the pope is getting better," spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said after the book presentation.
Portions of the book were released ahead of schedule last week in the pope's native Poland. The work is a compilation of conversations John Paul had in 1993 with two close Polish friends, the late Rev. Jozef Tischner and political philosopher Krzysztof Michalski.
In the epilogue, a chapter titled "Someone Guided the Bullet," his companions ask the pope about the shooting. He reiterates his belief that divine intervention caused the bullet to avoid his vital organs.
The pope says he remembered the rush to the hospital.
"For some time I remained conscious," he writes. "I had a feeling I was going to survive. I suffered, and that was a reason for fear, but I had this strange feeling of confidence."
John Paul told his trusted secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was with him when he was shot, that he forgave the would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca.
Two years later, at Christmas, the pope visited Agca in a Rome prison. During a long conversation, the pope recounts, the gunman seemed mystified that he had failed to kill his prey.
"As everyone says, [Agca] is a professional killer, which means that the assassination was not his initiative, that someone else thought of it, someone told him to do it," the pope writes.
The pope writes that Agca's confusion led the gunman to understand that a higher power can govern even his actions.
As part of a global struggle between good and evil, John Paul writes, the assassination was "one of the last convulsions of 20th-century ideologies of violence," such as fascism and Nazism.