John Paul II's beatification process is moving ahead swiftly and new reports of miracles attributed to the late pontiff reach Rome every week, the Vatican official in charge of the process said on Tuesday.
Monsignor Slawomir Oder revealed that three possible miracles are undergoing full investigation at present but that dozens of reports continue to arrive every week from all over the world.
He said the accounts given by people who believed they had been given divine help with illnesses and other problems were sent via Internet, in the mail or even left in envelopes on John Paul's tomb in the Vatican.
"All the reports we receive are treated very respectfully but only a few can form the basis for a full miracle investigation," he said.
The Polish pope will move a step closer to sainthood on April 2, exactly two years after his death, with the end of the main fact-gathering part of the canonisation procedures.
A special ceremony is to be held in a Roman basilica, marking the end of the so-called diocesan phase and the arrival in the Vatican of the weighty dossier which will then be studied by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
The dossier, containing the testimony of people who knew Karol Wojtyla before and after he became pope, will be examined by historians, theologians and cardinals.
If each of the three panels gives a green light, he will be beatified. Beatification, which requires one miracle, is the penultimate rung on the ladder to full sainthood, for which another miracle is needed.
There is continuing pressure in some parts of the church for John Paul to be made a saint immediately, without passing through the intermediate stage of beatification.
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, once the Polish pontiff's private secretary and now archbishop of Warsaw, admitted that this was his desire in a newspaper interview published last week.
"We don't want to dictate any course of action to the pope but this is, in truth, our desire," he told the Dziennik daily, adding that the man Karol Wojtyla belonged to "the whole world".
It is not clear how long it will take for the pontiff to be beatified.
Normally the process takes many years. However, Pope Benedict XVI has put the beatification cause on a fast track, waiving a rule requiring a five-year wait before the start of the process.
