(ANSA) - The last words ever spoken by Pope John Paul II were: "Let me go to the house of the Father," according to an official Vatican account of the pontiff's final hours.
The dying pope said the words in Polish at about 15.30 on April 2, before going into a coma and just over six hours before he died, says the account, which is to be published in coming days.
John Paul II's death at 21.37 ended a two-month struggle which is recounted in Latin in the new edition of Acta Apostolicae Sedis, a sort of official record of Vatican affairs.
The 200-page account starts when the pope was taken to hospital on January 31 with acute respiratory problems and describes in detail each of the stages leading to his death on April 2.
The last time John Paul was seen in public was on March 30, when he appeared at his window overlooking St Peter's Square for 13 minutes. He tried to speak but was unable to.
The volume shows that even at this stage doctors still believed he could recover. It was the onset on March 31 of a urinary infection, causing septicemia, that left them without hope. With the exception of the pope's final words, most of the content of the new book has already emerged in the media.
Commentators in the Italian press suggested that the volume was being published in order to prevent any confusion or disputes arising over the Polish pontiff's final hours. When his predecessor John Paul I died suddenly, after only 33 days in office, there was widespread speculation over the precise sequence of events. Some years later, one author even argued he had been poisoned.
Although the Vatican gave out quick and detailed bulletins during Karol Wojtyla's last days, some confusion still lingers.
For example, some news reports claimed that the pontiff went into a coma early on the day of his death, not at 19.00 as the new volume states. There were also reports saying that the pope's final
words were addressed to the young people who played an important role in his pontificate: "I looked for you and you came and for this I thank you." This phrase was reported to journalists by the head of the Vatican press office. He did not say it was the last one uttered by the pope, but some journalists took it that way.
In any case, the phrase does not appear in the official account in the Acta, an omission which appears to indicate that it was never spoken. Although the new Vatican volume specifies that John
Paul's last words were "Let me go to the house of the Father", it gives no information on who he said them to. According to Rome daily La Repubblica, the pope said his last intelligible sentence to Suor Tobiana, one of the Polish nuns who had looked after him in the Vatican for many years.
The daily said it had learned this detail from Renato Buzzonetti, the pope's personal doctor and the person who officially certified his death.
