Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to assassinate St. John Paul II in 1981 is now saying that he wants to become a Catholic priest.
According to Crux, Mehmet Ali Agca, 58, added yet another erratic statement to his catalog of strange requests during a recent interview with the Italian television network Canale 5.
“Here in Turkey, I live as a pensioner wasting my time. That’s why I want to make an appeal to Pope Francis: Welcome me in the Vatican, and I will become a priest,” he said.
“After John Paul II visited me in prison, I thought about it, and I studied the Gospel at length,” he continued. “I know the sacred books better than many others. If the pope welcomes me, I’ll be a priest and I will celebrate Mass, if he wants me!”
Ali Agca also expressed a desire to go to Fatima in Portugal in May, 2017, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Marian apparitions that occurred in 1917.
“I’ll pray there, maybe even together with the pope, to the Madonna, my spiritual mother,” he said.
Ali Agca spent 19 years in an Italian prison for shooting the pope on May 13, 1981. He was pardoned in the jubilee year 2000 at John Paul’s request, and was deported to his native Turkey where he served an additional 10 years behind bars before being released in 2010.
As Crux reports, Alì Ağca’s history of inconsistent and even delusional statements makes it hard to believe he really aspires to become a priest.
For instance, he has given several different accounts for his motive in shooting the pope which range from being aligned with the KGB to a connection with Islamic radicals.
He also wrote a letter in 2005 to the pope telling him that the world would end soon.
Several years after the pope died, he announced that he wanted to visit the Pope’s tomb and partner with Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, on a book about his life.
After his release from prison in 2010, Alì Ağca released a rambling and bizarre statement suggesting that he believed himself to be divine.
“I will meet you in the next three days. In the name of God Almighty, I proclaim the end of the world in this century,” the statement read. “All the world will be destroyed, every human being will die. I am not God, I am not son of God, I am Christ eternal.”
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