John Paul II shot
May 13, 1981

Pope John Paul supported Poland's Solidarity movement from the Vatican. As the movement gained strength, he often used his influence as pope to impress upon Poles the need to remain nonviolent and to advance slowly so that the communist regime would have little excuse to impose martial law or dismantle the Solidarity trade union.

This strategy was thrown into sudden crisis when John Paul was shot and nearly killed by a 23-year-old Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, on May 13, 1981. In Poland at this time, Primate Cardinal Wyszynski lay dying of cancer. The sudden prospect of losing both its spiritual leaders unsettled the Solidarity movement. Official investigators determined that Agca's assassination attempt was almost certainly a conspiracy but have never proved who sponsored it. Throughout the 1980s, however, it was widely believed that the Soviets had been behind the attempt in the hope of demoralizing the Solidarity movement. Regardless of the absence of proof, this popular belief probably helped to diminish the Soviet Union's moral authority at the time.

Seven months after the assassination attempt, Poland's General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law and arrested thousands of Solidarity activists, but the movement's networks were by then so deeply established that, encouraged by the pope's rapid recovery and his further visits to Poland, Solidarity was able to persevere. In 1989 the communists asked for negotiations with the trade union. This was followed within months by the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and, eventually, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. In December 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev became the first Soviet premier to visit the Vatican.

Visits from John Paul also weakened several dictatorships and juntas, including those of Brazil's Joao Baptista de Oliveira Figueiredo, the Philippines' Ferdinand E. Marcos, Haiti's Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Parguay's Alfredo Stroessner, Chile's Augusto Pinochet, and even Chun Doo Hwan of non-Catholic South Korea. After papal visits, each of these leaders had relinquished his rule within (at most) a few years, and though it is difficult to ascribe a direct cause-and-effect relationship in every case, it is clear that the papal visits and John Paul's messages raised expectations among the people of these countries and decreased the likelihood that these governments could endure indefinitely without significant change.

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