Rome: Mehmet Alì Ağca, a Turkish national who tried to kill Pope John Paul II, says he would like to become a Catholic priest.

“Here in Turkey, I live as a pensioner, wasting my time. So I want to make an appeal to Pope Francis: welcome me into the Vatican and I will become a priest.” Ağca, 58, said in an interview with an Italian TV network Canale 5.

He had shot and wounded the Pope in 1981. He had served 19 years in an Italian prison and a decade in a Turkish jail. He was released by a pontifical pardon in the jubilee year of 2000.

John Paul II visited Alì Ağca in 1983, two years after the assassination attempt in St Peter’s Square. Alì Ağca said he has since been studying scripture. “After John Paul II visited me in prison, I thought about it, and I studied the Gospel at length,” Alì Ağca said. “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!”

Ağca, a former member of the Turkish nationalist group the ‘Grey Wolves’, has made a series of bizarre statements – including about his motives – over the years.

In 2005, as John Paul II struggled with Parkinson’s disease, Alì Ağca wrote to him saying the world would soon end.

In 2010, he released a statement that appeared to suggest he regards himself as Jesus. “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,” it said. “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.”

He also said he wished to travel with Pope Francis in 2017 to Fatima. “I would go to Fatima next year, in May 2017, for the centenary of the Marian apparitions. And there praying, perhaps together with the Pope, Our Lady, my spiritual mother.”

Mehmet Alì Ağca shot Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. Pope John Paul often credited his survival to the protection of Our Lady of Fatima.