The Holy Father leads us in prayer following each of the Vigil's prophetic readings from the Old Testament. For the record, while there are 7 readings in the "full" Vigil, the Vatican only used 4 (which I thought was a little odd, but... it still lasted 3 hours. And on the eve of Benedict's 79th birthday - he is not a young John Paul, though it is only his first year as pope!)