SOFIA, Bulgaria -- Pope John Paul has absolved Bulgaria of any link to the assassination attempt on him in 1981, the Vatican has said.
The statement came after the pope met Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov on the second day of his trip to the ex-communist state.
It rebuffs years of speculation that the Balkan state was linked to gunman Mehmet Ali Agca.
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said: "The Holy Father... literally said, 'I never believed in the so called Bulgarian connection because of my great esteem and respect for the Bulgarian people'."
Agca, a Turk, shot the pope in St. Peter's Square, Rome, Italy, on May 13, 1981.
It was alleged he was commissioned by the Bulgarian secret service acting on the orders of the Soviet KGB, which feared the Pontiff would stir anti-communist revolt.
An Italian court acquitted three Bulgarians of complicity, citing a lack of evidence.
John Paul II's visit to Bulgaria is the first-ever to the former communist country by a pope.
Foreign Minister Solomon Pasi was quoted by The Associated Press as calling the visit "a blessing," adding: "This visit will wipe out the undeserved taint Bulgaria has carried for the past 20 years."
In a speech on Thursday, the pope said he had "never ceased" to love the Bulgarian people.
The pope visited Sofia's main Orthodox cathedral on Friday and was to meet later with Patriarch Maxim, the leader of Bulgaria's Orthodox Christians.
He is also scheduled to visit an Orthodox monastery near the southern town of Rila and hold an outdoor mass in the southeast in Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second-largest city.
The trip is the pope's latest effort to break down traditional barriers between the world's major religions and focus instead on the common values that bind them.
"With respect I greet His Holiness Patriarch Maxim," the pope said Thursday. "I fervently hope that my visit will serve to increase our knowledge of each other."
For years, Maxim refused to meet the pope, thwarting numerous efforts by the Bulgarian government to organise a visit, which the Vatican said it would consent to only if Orthodox leaders would welcome it. He relented in March.
Maxim attended Thursday's papal welcome ceremony, although he made it clear that he did not want the pope's visit to Sofia's main Orthodox cathedral to coincide with Friday's services there.
The Pope's trip to Bulgaria is another attempt to bridge the divide between the two great branches of Christianity, which split in 1054, and which the Pontiff has campaigned to reunite throughout his 23-year pontificate.
"Christ our Lord founded a single Church, while we today appear to the world divided," the Pope told Patriarch Maxim, head of Bulgaria's Orthodox Church, to which 80 percent of the population of eight million belong.
Efforts to bring together the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity have been confounded in part by Orthodox suspicion that Roman Catholics want to steal their flock.
Bulgaria is the sixth Orthodox country the Pope has visited. He has not realized his dream of visiting Russia because of opposition from Moscow's religious hierarchy.
But the Vatican has been pleased by its welcome in Bulgaria. Maxim attended the arrival ceremony Thursday despite having said he would boycott the event.
At his official reception in Maxim's palace the Pope was offered a traditional greeting of nuts, coffee, water and rakia, the local plum brandy. The Pope politely declined to taste the rakia but was given a bottle to take back to Rome with him.
The Pope looked reasonably alert as he met Maxim, toured the gold-domed St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Bulgaria's biggest church, and laid a wreath to Saints Cyril and Methodius.
The pope also remembered the victims of east Europe's authoritarian regimes.
"Even during the long winter of the totalitarian system, which brought suffering to your country... numberless children of this people remained heroically faithful to Christ, in not a few cases to the point of sacrificing their lives," he said.
But crowds were small. Stern warnings about security have disheartened ordinary Bulgarians who have preferred to leave Sofia for the weekend rather than greet the Pope.
Organizers will be hoping for a bigger turnout Sunday, the last day of the five-day two nation tour that started in Azerbaijan, when the Pope travels to the heartland of the Catholic community around the central city of Plovdiv.
Mass for Bulgaria's 80,000 Roman Catholic minority will be the grand finale of his 96th official foreign trip. The pope will beatify three Roman Catholic priests who were executed in 1952 after being convicted of spying by the then communist regime.