In 1981, on this day the Holy Father Pope John Paul II was assassinated by the Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Aǧca as he entered St. Peter's Square to address an audience.

The Silencing of the PopeBoth the Central Intelligence Agency and an Italian parliamentary commission concluded that the Soviet Union was behind the conspiracy in retaliation for the Pope's support of Solidarity, the Catholic, pro-democratic Polish workers' movement (their "Top Secret" reports stated that certain Communist Bulgarian security departments were utilised and Soviet military intelligence - and not the KGB - were responsible).

Of course the Pope was deeply involved in the transformative events which were developing in Poland.

Born Karol Jozef Wojtyla in Wadowice in 1920, his father, a non-commissioned officer in the Polish Army, died of a heart attack in 1941. leaving him the sole surviving member of his immediate family. "I was not at my mother's death, I was not at my brother's death, I was not at my father's death", he said, reflecting on these times of his life, nearly forty years later, "At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved".

On 29 February 1944, he was knocked down by a German truck. German Wehrmacht officers then tended to him and sent him to a hospital. He spent two weeks there recovering from a severe concussion and a shoulder injury. This accident and his survival seemed to he a confirmation of his priestly vocation. On 6 August 1944 the Gestapo rounded up young men in Krakow to avoid an uprising similar to the previous uprising in Warsaw. he escaped by hiding in the basement of his uncle's home at 10 Tyniecka Street, while German troops searched upstairs. More than eight thousand men and boys were taken into custody that day, but he escaped to the Archbishop's Palace,where he remained in hiding until after the Germans left.

But ironically, at the time of his death, John Paul II was giving serious consideration to a completely different matter that would profoundly affect the long-term future of the Soviet Union. Because on that very day in 1917 the consecration of Russia had been revealed by the Blessed Virgin to three Portugese shepherds.

Within a decade the Cold War would end and the Soviet Union would fragment into hundreds of tiny successor states. John Paul II's successors would come to believe that a consecration might have saved Russia because such a blessing would have given legitimacy to a unified state. But in the event subsequent Popes moved onto the larger goal of a seamless union with the Eastern Orthodox Church, to finally close a schism that had emerged in the first millennia with the separation of the East and West Roman Empires.