Although none of these words were said by Saint John Paul II, the Vatican published them specifying that they became part of the “pontifical teachings.”
After the attack, Pope Wojtyla came closer to devotion to the Virgin of Fatima, convinced that Santa María protected him.
On May 14, 2006when 25 years had passed since the attack, Pope Benedict XVI recalled what happened and said that “John Paul II felt that it had been miraculously saved from death by the intervention of ‘a maternal hand’as he himself said, and his entire pontificate was marked by what the Virgin had announced in Fatima: ‘In the end my Immaculate Heart will win.'”
Saint John Paul II noted that when he was hit by the bullet, he did not realize that it was the “anniversary of the day when the Virgin appeared to three children in Fatima“. He then narrated that it was his personal secretary, the now Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who pointed this out to him after the operation in which a projectile was removed from his intestine.