ROME – Pope John Paul struggled hard to find his voice to address pilgrims assembled in Rome yesterday for the traditional Easter Mass.

He stood at a window looking over St Peter’s Square as about 70,000 people watched the agonizing spectacle, many in tears. In the end, he had to give up and make the sign of the Cross with his hand.

“Oh no!” said Maria Romero, from Peru, as the Pope’s aide took away the microphone. “The poor man can’t speak,” she said, tears streaming down her face.

When he appeared at the window of his study, a warm applause went up among the crowd, who had gathered despite drizzly weather.

But the cheers quickly turned to silence as 84-year-old John Paul II tried in vain to speak into a microphone placed before him.

What, if anything, he had said had been too low and hoarse to be perceptible. The only thing heard was his labored breathing. On such an important day for Christianity, the painful incident offered some indication of the extent of the drama being played out in the Vatican as the Pope looks increasingly frail.

For the first time in his 27-year-long papacy, the pontiff was absent from all the other Holy Week events, a result of two recent periods in hospital and the emergency tracheotomy he had on February 24 to ease breathing and throat problems.

Italian state television called yesterday’s appearance in which John Paul, evidently frustrated, was unable to even pronounce his Urbi et Orbi (“to the city and the world”) traditional Easter blessing, the “most moving and poignant of his pontificate.”

The last time that the Pope spoke in public was on March 13, just before he left hospital for the second time in a month.

Adding to the poignancy was a report that the Pope had been taking voice lessons for a fortnight in order to be able to pronounce yesterday’s blessing.

He had not attended the Easter vigil Mass the previous night, it was said, in order to rest for yesterday.

It had not been entirely expected that the Pope – whose tracheotomy, and perhaps also other health complications, has deprived him of much of his power of speech – would be able to speak yesterday.

But it had been desired by the Church in order to show that on such an important day the Pope could still, however falteringly, address and mesmerize the crowds. On Good Friday, when it was hoped that he might have at least blessed the crowds at arm’s length, the Pope’s image had only appeared on giant screens in a video link-up during the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum.

However all the crowd could see was an elderly man, pictured from the back, slumped in his throne, watching the event on television. No footage of his face was made available.

It fell to Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Pope’s secretary of state, to celebrate Easter Mass in St Peter’s Square. During the Mass, the window of the papal study upstairs was symbolically kept open. In the square, a prayer was read out asking God to give “new life and energy” to the Church, and to “our bishop and Pope John Paul II.”

At the end of the Mass, Cardinal Sodano read out on the Pope’s behalf his Urbi et Orbi message.

His message included a call for peace in the Middle East and Africa, “where so much blood continues to be spilled.”

The Pope also invited people to show generous solidarity to the multitudes of poor and those who suffered from “hunger, lethal epidemics, and natural catastrophes.”

The prayer ended with the request that those seeking “the true sense of their existence” be blessed with “faith and hope,” and for the natural progress of man to not eclipse the spiritual values of the soul.