"The Holy Father, kneeling in prayer, looked huge. The cape on his wide shoulders called to mind a snow-covered landscape and I wondered how it had been possible to get a mountain into such a small space. (Since the attempted assassination of 13 May 1981 the snow will have melted to reveal the bare rock.) I had before me a block of prayer. After Mass, said quite meticulously and with the stately pace of an orbiting planet, twenty minutes were devoted to the thanksgiving, a practice almost obsolete elsewhere, during which John Paul II remained kneeling on his prie-Dieu, the arm-rest of which is the size of a lectern. He prays, I had almost said as he breathes, and yet his prayer is action."
(André Frossard, Be Not Afraid! p 32)
