Weary pope prepares for marathon year

VATICAN CITY, Rome, Italy – Pope Benedict XVI embarks Saturday on a busy few days ahead of a packed 2012 looking visibly weary though his aides insist he is not ill and ascribe the pontiff’s tiredness to his advanced years.

The 84-year-old German pope has appeared thin and drawn at recent public appearances and bishops who met him have commented on his weary appearance.

He has to be helped up and down stairs due to mild arthritis.

“It’s just his age,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“The pope has no particular illness,” he said, adding: “For an old man, he’s in excellent shape.”

“Benedict XVI can cope with numerous engagements as he showed in September in Germany when his programme was exhausting,” Lombardi said.

“He has taken on engagements for next year including an intercontinental trip” to Cuba and Mexico, he added.

The pope has more imminent appointments too, with a Christmas Eve mass at Saint Peter’s Basilica that will be transmitted around the world.

The pontiff may have to use a mobile platform for the service to move around the giant basilica, pushed along by special Vatican assistants.

On Christmas Day he will deliver his traditional “Urbi et Orbi” blessing on Saint Peter’s Square and on Monday the Angelus prayer.

On New Year’s Eve, he will president over Vespers in Saint Peter’s again and then celebrate mass on January 1 on World Peace Day.

“He always shows a great lucidity and presence,” Lombardi said.

Benedict last Sunday showed some of that lucidity, speaking at length without notes in Rome’s Rebibbia prison with 300 detainees.

In a book of interviews last year, the pope did not exclude the possibility of resigning if his physical or intellectual strength is diminished.

But he has underlined he is not the type to resign in the face of difficulty, like the mountain of child abuse scandals rocking the Church.

Giovanni Maria Vian, the editor of the official Vatican daily, Osservatore Romano, said the pope is very worried about what he views as a world crisis of faith.

“This preoccupation is not the same as pessimism. The pope is neither pessimistic nor weary,” he wrote in an editorial in Friday’s edition.

For the World Youth Days in Madrid as well as during his visit to Benin this year, the pope showed stamina even when overwhelmed and he seemed reinvigorated by the warm welcome far from the corridors of power in the Vatican.

Next year looks to be a busy one, with his trip to Cuba and Mexico in March likely to see the mass welcome he is no longer used to in Europe.

Aides have said he cannot travel to high-altitude zones in Mexico because of his heart problems. He may also visit Lebanon later in the year.

The pope may preside over a consistory of cardinals as early as February, hold a world meeting of Catholic families in Milan and call a synod of bishops in October to push for a new global evangelisation.

The child abuse scandal will be a heavy challenge in the year ahead with bishops’ conferences from around the world due to agree on and begin implementing stringent new norms against paedophile clergy.