For almost 60 years, Camillo Cibin was the silent shadow of six popes, a broad-shouldered but discreet presence as their chief bodyguard and latterly the Vatican’s head of security. He came to wider attention, much to his dismay, only in 1981 when his worst fears were realised in the form of the attempted assassination of John Paul II.

On May 13 that year, Cibin was at his usual station by the driver’s side of the popemobile as the Pontiff greeted crowds in St Peter’s Square. Among them was a Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, working probably for the Bulgarian, and ultimately the Soviet, secret service, who fired six shots at the vehicle. The Pope was hit four times, twice in the stomach. Two spectators were also wounded.

The director of the Italian police squad in the square leapt on top of John Paul, while Cibin vaulted the wooden crush barriers and with the help of bystanders apprehended Agca. He was jailed and released after 19 years, having been forgiven by the Pope, and is now serving out a sentence in Turkey for a previous political murder. Once John Paul II had recovered — having lost three quarters of his blood in the attack — Cibin offered to resign his post, but was gently reasssured by the Pope that his trust in him was still complete.

If Cibin felt in need of redemption, it came exactly a year later. Agca’s attempt had occurred on the anniversary of the first appearance in 1917 of the Virgin to children at Fatima, Portugal, which subsequently became a place of pilgrimage. John Paul attributed his survival to her protection, and on May 12, 1982, he visited the shrine to give thanks. There he was lunged at by a maverick and unstable priest, Juan Maria Fernández y Krohn, who was armed with a blade. Cibin was the first to sense danger, and warded off the attacker’s hand, leaving the Pope unharmed or, by some reports, with only a slight flesh wound that was hushed up. Thereafter the press inevitably dubbed Cibin the Pope’s “Guardian Angel”.

Camillo Cibin was born at Salgareda, 20 miles north of Venice, in 1926. At 21, he and four friends, at the urging of their parish priest, applied to be accepted by the Holy See’s gendarmerie. Founded by Pope Pius VII in 1816, this originally formed part of the papacy’s military forces, but by the Second World War had evolved into the body responsible for internal security and border control.

Further changes were to come in Cibin’s time, as in 1970 Pope Paul VI reduced the enclave’s military to just the Swiss Guard. The gendarmerie became the civil police force, charged with investigating and preventing crime relating to the Vatican and pontifical interests. Their 19th-century ceremonial uniforms, complete with plumed hats, were exchanged for sober outfits and, when on protection duty, dark suits.

Cibin had taken charge of security for the Second Vatican Council, the great reform of the Roman Catholic Church which had met from 1962 until 1965. In 1971 he was appointed deputy commander of the new security force, now 130 strong, and the following year became its head. As well as Cibin having policing duties, once the Pope was outside his apartments he was also in effect his personal guard. Accordingly, he accompanied popes on all their trips outside the Vatican Palace, and was the only person to have been on every papal flight abroad for pastoral visits. He made nine of these journeys with Paul VI, visited 104 places with John Paul II and two with the present Pope.

These tours involved him in much diligent preparation beforehand and co-ordination with the local security services, while on the ground he covered miles at a time running alongside the popemobile. He perfected a form of open-handed chop that dissuaded the faithful from trying to cling on to the vehicle, but which left no broken bones.

Cibin also went with the popes on thousands of visits within Italy itself, and when John Paul II was in the early years of his papacy he strode beside him on Alpine hikes during the summer. A frank but respectful man, entirely without airs and graces, he was much attached to the Polish Pontiff, and brought him back from the Gemelli clinic in Rome to die in the Vatican. He then presided over the security arrangements for the conclave that elected Benedict XVI, as he had done for those that elected John Paul I and II.

Although now white-haired and in his late seventies, Cibin remained fit and vital. John Paul had refused to let him step down, and he stayed on to oversee the transition to a new papal era, accompanying Pope Benedict to Germany in 2005, and then to Poland in May 2006.

A week later, on the eve of his 80th birthday, he retired, and was succeeded by his deputy, Domenico Giani.

Cibin’s discretion was celebrated, although he did once tell a newly appointed cardinal: “Don’t think that it’s all just roses in the Vatican.” He never gave an interview — not even, joked the Vatican press corps, the time of day. At his funeral Mass, which was held in St Peter’s itself, he was praised to the congregation as having amply fulfilled the trust reposed in him.

He is survived by his wife, Maria, and by a son and two daughters.

Camillo Cibin, former Inspector-General of the Corps of Gendarmes of the Vatican City State, was born on June 5, 1926. He died on October 25, 2009, aged 83