Pope John Paul led the world's estimated one billion Roman Catholics into the most joyous season of their Church's liturgical calendar tonight, presiding at an Easter Eve service in St Peter's Basilica.
The service had originally been scheduled for St Peter's Square to allow more people to attend, but was moved indoors because of bad weather.
The Pope, who turns 81 next month, walked slowly and leaned on his walking cross as he began the service in the atrium of the largest church in Christendom, where he carved the Greek letters Alpha and Omega on a large candle.
The huge basilica, which was kept in darkness, became a sea of flickers as the congregation lit tens of thousands of candles in a gesture symbolising the darkness in the world after Christ's death and the light of the Easter resurrection.
Then the church's great lights were turned on and the Pope, standing on a mobile platform to conserve his strength, was wheeled up the main aisle to the altar to say mass.
During the service, which was attended by more than 10,000 people inside the basilica and followed by others outside, the Pope, wearing gold and white vestments, baptised six adult converts to Catholicism.
The six, five women and one man, came from Japan, Italy, China, Albania, the United States and Peru.
In his homily, which he read in a clear and relatively strong, firm voice, the Pope recounted the Easter story in which two women went to the tomb where Christ had been buried and found it empty because he had risen from the dead.
"What blessed women. They did not know that this was the dawn of the most important day of history. They could not have known that they, they themselves would be the first witnesses of Jesus's Resurrection", he said.
The Pope said in his homily that the Resurrection had completely turned around the perspective of history.
"Death gives way to life, a life that dies no more...this is the truth that we proclaim with our words, but above all with our lives. He whom the women thought was dead is alive. Their experience becomes our experience", he said.
Holy Saturday was the third of four hectic days that again have tested the Pope's stamina.
The Pope he presided at two services on Thursday, including one in which he washed and kissed the feet of 12 elderly priests to commemorate Christ's gesture of humility toward his apostles on the night before he died.
On Friday, he presided at a Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) service at the Coliseum but for the first time in 22 years, he did not walk around the arena with the congregation but remained kneeling in intense prayer for all but the end of the service.
Holy Week culminates on Easter Sunday when the Pope says mass and delivers his twiceyearly Urbi et Orbi ( To the city and the world ) blessing and message and reads Easter greetings to the world in some 60 languages.