Pope due to leave intensive care ward

Press, 19 May 1981, Page 8

Pope due to leave intensive care ward

NZPA-Reuter ■ Home. .. Pope; John Paul .celebrated the start of his. sixty-first ' birthday in an intensive- cafe ■ ward yesterday, but-his doc- ' tors said he was recovering fast enough that he could be moved to a normal hospital room later? : "He is improving slowly. It looks?-like' he will be all . right,”' Dr Giancarlo Castiglioni, one of the Pope’s doctors, said. - "He is a really good pa-', tient, very co-operative.” Some of the Church’s most, ■powerful cardinals . and’ •. bishops planned to . honour ;thj j Pope’s birthday at a •lyiass in St. Peter’s Basilica. ■?The Pope’s fellow patients

planned to celebrate a second Mass for the same . purpose later in the day in a chapel in Rome’s Gemelli Policlinico Hospital. Doctors planned to move the Pope up seven floors to an eleventh-storey room in the hospital. On the wall of the room hangs an image of the Black Madonna of .Czestochowa, the most famous icon of the Pope’s native Poland, where he was born Karol Wojtyla in Krakow on May 18, 1920.'. . ' In his intensive care room .the Pope rose from his . bed -.and sat in. an armchair for the first time since a.gunman shot him in St Peter’s Square on Thursday.' -? '■■■ . The Pope yesterday par-;

doned his attacker in a brief,' tape-recorded message broadcast to 15,000 in the square, and to millions more in Italy and abroad. "I pray for that brother of ours who shot me, and whom I have sincerely pardoned,” the Pope said in a slightly slurred but steady voice. The police were holding Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk charged with attempting to assassinate the Pope, in Rome’s police headquarters. The Turkish Ambassador to the United States said Agca was. a hired killer for an international Right-wing group. . Agca, aged' 23, has insisted; that, he acted'alone, but th<

? Italian police believe some-' ; one helped him escape from ; a Turkish jail in 1979 and ! travel through half a dozen European countries before . the shooting. i "Certainly he had financial ' help. But it is possible he * decided to shoot the Pope on his own,” an anti-terrorist • police officer said. The police said they believed that Agca fired two bullets instead of three as previously reported. A police statement said evidence indicated that one gunman fired j. two shots, < which' also I •* wounded two women tourists standing in the crowd at the Pope’s weekly general audience. .