Pope John Paul has celebrated an open-air mass in Lourdes in southwest France.
Speaking in French to a crowd of some 300,000 people, the Pope made special mention of the six million pilgrims, many of them very sick, who come to seek healing and to worship at the shrine each year.
The mass came at the end of his two-day pilgrimage to one of the Catholic Church's most sacred shrines.
He was greeted on his arrival yesterday by the French President Jacques Chirac.
The Pope prayed in the grotto of Saint Bernadette, where he made a rare personal reference to his own declining health.
The 84-year-old pontiff, who is suffering from Parkinson's disease, reached out to the sick in Lourdes in a symbolic gesture of solidarity.
