Pope John Paul finished an emotional visit to Lourdes yesterday by completing a sermon which encouraged many other suffering people around him. The crowd of approximately 200,000 gathered to listen to the pope’s words on the banks of the Gave River. The river is near the cliff-side shrine where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to the peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.

Throughout the city, an estimated 300,000 people packed the Pyrenean town hoping for a glimpse of the pontiff, and there were so few rooms left that French radio stations advised latecomers to bring a tent.

The Pope, who is 84, was greeted at the airport by Jacques Chirac, the French President, at the start of his 104th foreign visit, and his seventh to France. He was officially celebrating the 150th anniversary of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX in 1854.

The Pope's illness and frailty has been very evident on this tour, the 104th of his pontificate, made even more poignant because he has been surrounded by fellow sufferers, many of them in wheelchairs and on stretchers. Sick people in the crowd. They saw him as an example of the triumph of the spirit over the failures of the flesh.

The Pope, who has been known as "God's Athlete," is wracked by Parkinson's and severe arthritis but says he is determined to do his job to the end. His every move was greeted by cheers and the chanting of “Papa”. Later in the afternoon, after a rest in his modest room at the Accueil Notre-Dame, he headed a procession to the Basilica of Lourdes.

Approximately 6 million people visit the site in Lourdes every year, and many who come pray for miracle cures as they drink holy waters that flow out of the grotto. The Roman Catholic Church has recognised 66 cases of what it calls miraculous healings among the thousands of pilgrims who have said they left Lourdes free of their ailments.

After a brief rest in the afternoon, the Pope made a final visit to the grotto for 10 minutes of silent prayer and then flew back to Rome in the early evening.

The Pope's medical records were in fact, flown to a nearby hospital in case of an emergency and a specially equipped ambulance was part of the official cortege. If needed, a helicopter was on standby to take him to Italy.

In his message, the Pope said, "This grotto also issues a special call to women. Appearing here, Mary entrusted her message to a young girl, as if to emphasise the special mission of women in our own time, tempted as it is by materialism and secularism. (The mission was)... to be in today's society a witness of those essential values which are seen only with the eyes of the heart."

The Pope has been a lifelong follower of the Virgin Mary and credits her with saving his life when he was shot in a 1981 assassination attempt.

Last month the Vatican issued a document defending women's rights in the workplace but saying modern feminism's fight for power and gender equality was undermining the traditional concept of the family.