c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) An Italian government commission has concluded “beyond any reasonable doubt” that leaders of the former Soviet Union were behind the 1981 assassination attempt on the late Pope John Paul II.

The report will be presented to parliament later this month, and confirms _ at least for many in the church _ a longstanding assumption that communist leaders saw the Polish-born pope as a threat.

And though the report may not change the conventional wisdom surrounding the shooting, some scholars say it nonetheless cements John Paul’s image as the ultimate victor over communism and adds to his popular mystique.

“Certainly in terms of our esteem of this man … if you have a whole totalitarian bloc wanting to get rid of you, that only adds to your stature as a person,” said the Rev. Anthony Figueiredo of Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J.

A draft of the report was obtained by Religion News Service and other media outlets on Thursday (March 2).

John Paul was shot by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca on May 13, 1981, after an open-air audience in St. Peter’s Square. John Paul spent months in recovery, and later forgave Agca and met with him in prison.

The 26-page report _ a chapter in a longer report on KGB activity in Italy _ says Soviet leaders sought to “eliminate” John Paul as he emerged as a vocal supporter of anti-Communist forces in his native Poland, which would later lead to the unraveling of the Soviet empire.

“They relayed this decision to the military secret services for them to take on all necessary operations to commit a crime of unique gravity, without parallel in modern times,” the report said.

The report also implicates Bulgarian secret police in the plot, even though two Italian trials in 1986 failed to convict three Bulgarian nationals or establish what has been called “the Bulgarian connection.”

Sen. Paolo Guzzanti, president of the parliamentary commission that produced the report, said computerized imaging technology was used to identify a man photographed near the pope’s automobile as Sergei Antonov, who had connections to the KGB. Judges in the 1986 trial said the man photographed was an American tourist.

“We have evidence that the man in the photo with the big mustache and glasses was Antonov,” Guzzanti said in an interview, calling the evidence the “smoking gun” in the case.

Antonov, who was the Rome station chief for Balkan Air at the time, was later freed, along with two other Bulgarians charged in the plot. Antonov is still alive and living in Bulgaria, the Associated Press reported.

Guzzanti said the plot told by Agca to Italian investigators fit “with evidence we have of meetings between Antonov and the KGB in Rome,” although Agca has changed his story several times over the years.

Agca served 19 years in an Italian jail for the shooting and more than five years in a Turkish prison for the murder of a journalist. He was released on Jan. 12, but was returned days later to serve more time in the reporter’s death. He is scheduled to be released in 2010.

A spokesman for Russia’s foreign intelligence service dismissed the Italian report as “completely absurd,” and a Bulgarian official said “this case closed” with the 1986 trials, according to the Reuters news agency.

In some ways, the report only confirms what was already widely suspected, and some aren’t sure the evidence is watertight. “That’s the trouble with conspiracies, they’re hard to prove,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a visiting scholar at Santa Clara University in California.

For his part, many say John Paul probably knew who wanted him dead. In his final book, “Memory and Identity,” published before his death last April, John Paul speculated that Ali Agca did not act alone.

“Ali Agca, as everyone says, is a professional assassin,” John Paul wrote. “This means that the attempt was not done on his initiative, that it was someone else who thought it up, that someone else commissioned him.”

At the same time, John Paul seemed to dismiss any Bulgarian involvement during a visit there in 2002, and in his book, he blamed the shooting on “one of the last convulsions of the ideologies of arrogance let loose in the 20th century.”

Regardless of who was to blame, the story is likely to add a new dimension to John Paul’s storied history. Not only did he outlive communism, the thinking goes, but he survived a communist bullet that tried to silence him.

“In terms of his biography and how we look at him,” Reese said, “it makes a big difference whether he was shot by some crazy idiot, or whether it was a true political conspiracy by people trying to get him out of the way.” Many observers agree the new revelations won’t necessarily speed John Paul on the path to sainthood. However, they could buttress the belief in some circles that John Paul was a martyr _ albeit one who lived _ for his beliefs.

Last summer, the editor of the Vatican newspaper called John Paul “an authentic martyred pope” because his blood was shed. Some believe John Paul the Martyr would help him become John Paul the Great or even St. John Paul.

But that may not be enough, said John-Peter Pham, an expert on the papacy at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va.

“In Catholic canon law, you’re either a martyr or you’re not,” Pham said. “You may get extra credit points, but no more than if you suffered from some dreadful illness. It’s just part of your biography.”

MO/JL END RNS

(Kevin Eckstrom reported from Washington and Kristine M. Crane from Rome.)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Pope John Paul II in his popemobile after he was shot, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject (popemobile) or slug (RNS POPE OBIT).