VATICAN, Vatican City, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- A Vatican account of Pope John Paul II's final days vividly describes his last hours.
The report said John Paul's final words were, "Let me go to the house of the Father," which he uttered about six hours before dying in his apartment on April 2.
The report is being released as a supplement to the Vatican's official journal, The Acta Apostolicae Sedis. Excerpts were published in the Sunday issue of Avvenire, a Roman Catholic newspaper.
The Vatican did not provide a similar report for John Paul's predecessor, Pope John Paul I, who died in 1978, just 33 days into his papacy. As a result, conspiracy theories abounded about his death, the New York Times said.
George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and a papal biographer, said the Vatican's report on John Paul II should be construed as an effort "to clarify the sequence of events."
"It is important to have that on the record before the mythmakers take over," he told the New York Times.
