Correspondent Barry Kalb happened to be reading about terrorism in Italy when word reached him at the TIME Rome bureau that Pope John Paul II had been shot in St. Peter's Square. He pieced together the grim sequence of events and then rushed to Gemelli Hospital to pursue reports on the Pope's condition. Says Kalb: "When I had a minute to breathe later that evening, I realized that I had been more saddened than surprised by the fact that someone would shoot the Pope. And that saddened me more than anything else." Rome Bureau Chief Wilton Wynn was in Beirut reporting on the current confrontation between Israel and Syria when he received news of the attack. Wynn, who was in Manila in 1970 when a knife-wielding Bolivian fanatic lunged at Pope Paul VI, hurried back to Rome to cover his second attempted papal assassination. "In the wake of the Lennon killing and the Reagan shooting, this attack looks like part of a chain reaction of violence," says Wynn. "One such highly publicized event seems to put the idea in yet another assassin's mind." Joining Wynn and Kalb was Bonn Bureau Chief Roland Flamini, a Vatican hand of long experience who served for three years as a TIME correspondent in Rome before moving to Bonn in March. Flamini, author of the recently published book Pope, Premier, President, has reported on the deaths of John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul I. Says he: "The first understandably confused accounts of the shooting were serious enough to make me think I was about to cover my fourth papal death. For once, I was glad to be wrong."

Associate Editor Richard Ostling, who wrote the assessment of John Paul II's papacy accompanying this week's story, is also a seasoned observer of the Holy See. As TIME's religion writer since 1975, Ostling has done five cover stories on papal subjects. Says he: "Unfortunately, the attack on John Paul II is part of a pattern that has been developing for years." Senior Writer George Church, who wrote the main narrative, first became acquainted with John Paul II when he did the cover story on the Pope's visit to America in 1979. Says Church: "He is a remarkably popular individual who has managed to convince even those who disagree with him that we are all united under God's love. To have somebody attempt to kill him is like aiming bullets at an ideal."

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