25 Years Ago in TIME

An Italian commission last week confirmed old theories that the Soviet Union was behind the assassination attempt on POPE JOHN PAUL II.

An instant before it happened, one camera's eye caught a tableau that might serve as the late 20th century's most succinct text on the metaphysics of terrorism. There, on a mellow May afternoon at St. Peter's Square, beneath the encircling Bernini columns, the most vigorously gregarious of Popes rides slowly through a sea of tourists and pilgrims. It is a rite of sweet human communion. The Pope reaches out for babies in the crowd. He gently blesses the faces that give back a radiant daze of whatever it is that they see in the man--celebrity, charisma, holiness or, at least, a huge friendliness. But just there, floating from the left of the frame into the proceedings of history, like a shark's fin at the edge of a crowd splashing at the beach, moves a disembodied hand and its tense instrument, a blue-black pistol. It is poised there forever. And then it explodes at the Pope's white robe. --TIME, May 25, 1981

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