FaithWorld

Following is the full text of an open letter issued on Wednesday in Istanbul by lawyers for Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot Pope John Paul in 1981. Agca is due to be released from a Turkish jail on Monday January 18.

Mehmet Ali Agca in Istanbul during short release from jail on 20 Jan 2006/Ahmet Ada

OPEN LETTER 13 January 2010

1 = Terrorism is the Evil of the Devil.

2 = All religions prohibit and condemn Terrorism.

3 = The AL QAEDA is a psychopathic criminal NAZI organization. And remember that the Oklahoma City bomber TIMOTHY MCVEIGH was a NAZI too.

4 = The terrorist HITLER, the terrorist OSAMA BIN LADEN, the terrorist APO (jailed Kurdistan Workers Party leader Abdullah Ocalan), the terrorist POL POT are the common enemies of all religions and all nations in the world.

5 = The Arabic world must never misuse any religion for their national problems.

Pope John Paul meets Mehmet Ali Agca in Rome's Rebibbia prison on 27 Dec 1983/Vatican photo

Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who tried to kill Pope John Paul in 1981, is due to be released from prison in Turkey on January 18.  In a rambling statement issued by his lawyers on Wednesday, he called for a “new American Empire” championing peace and democracy.

Here are some facts about Agca and the enigmatic path that took him from life as a small-time gangster in Turkey to the would-be assassin on St. Peter’s Square.

Four and a half years after his death, Pope John Paul II remains a dominant presence in Poland’s Roman Catholic Church. Pictures of him are still ubiquitous in his homeland, and not only in churches. His former private secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, regularly invoked the name of the Polish-born pontiff during an interview in Krakow with Reuters, either lauding his role in the victory of democracy over communism in eastern Europe two decades ago or speaking of the need for the church today to follow his example in reaching out to other faiths in a spirit of ecumenical dialogue.

Perhaps the issue playing most on the cardinal’s mind was the expected beatification of John Paul by his successor, Pope Benedict XVI. Beatification is the last step before sainthood. Benedict put his predecessor on ae fast track shortly after taking over at the Vatican in 2005. Dziwisz said the process was now well advanced but the timing of a final decision depended on Benedict.

“(The beatification) is important not only for the Catholic Church,” he said. “This Pope is still alive, the memory of him is still vivid and he is still the reference point for many people. This love is still present.”