John Paul's final words revealed by Vatican

STRUGGLING to breathe, Pope John Paul II mumbled his final words in Polish: "Let me go to the house of the Father." Six hours later, the comatose pontiff died, the Vatican says.

The account of John Paul's final hours appears in a meticulous official report on his last weeks, released in what may be an effort to ward off doubts about how forthcoming the Vatican has been about his illness and April 2 death.

There was much speculation in past decades over how some pontiffs died.

John Paul I's brief tenure of 33 days in 1978 spawned conspiracy theories that he did not die naturally in his bed, as the Vatican said. Some wondered if he have been killed because he had information about a banking scandal in which the Holy See's bank was later found to be involved.

While no one has publicly suggested anything amiss about John Paul II's final hours, the Vatican was silent for years when it was apparent the globe-trotting, widely-beloved pontiff was suffering the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Many of the details had already been revealed, but the 220-page report gives more description of the pontiff's decline. It went on sale at the Vatican recently.

The book has entries in chronological order, starting with January 31, the day the Vatican's press office announced the Pope's audiences were being suspended because he had flu symptoms. It chronicles his symptoms, care and response to treatment during two hospitalisations and then during his last days in his Vatican City apartment.

Following the second hospitalisation, which included throat surgery to insert a breathing tube, John Paul's convalescence was hampered by "very difficult swallowing," laborious attempts to speak, and "nutritional deficit and marked weakness," the account says.

Swallowing and breathing problems were consequences of Parkinson's disease, which the 84-year-old Pope suffered from for years, doctors have said.

The official account is quite close to one offered last month by John Paul's longtime personal secretary, now Krakow Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz. He said a nun who was near the pontiff heard him say: "Let me go to the Lord."

Media accounts published at the time of John Paul's death said he looked toward the apartment window and whispered "Amen." One newspaper quoted a Polish priest as saying the Pope died "an instant" later.

According to the Vatican, the Pope uttered his final words at 3:30pm, and slipped into a coma at 7pm.

"According to a Polish tradition, a small, lit candle illuminated the twilight of the room, where the pope was expiring," it said.

The Vatican account describes the pontiff as experiencing various levels of participation in what was going on around him.