Aging Pope Looks Ahead To Activities In Year 26

By JOHN THAVIS, CNS

Published: October 16, 2003

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – As aides prepared 25th-anniversary celebrations for mid-October, Pope John Paul II was already looking ahead to year 26 and its inevitable round of meetings, liturgies and documents.

The pace of the pontificate has clearly slowed, and the pope’s fragility means that fewer big projects are on the calendar. But there’s enough in the pipeline to keep the 83-year-old pontiff busier than many men half his age.

High on the pope’s agenda over the next year are “ad limina” meetings with all U.S. bishops. The visits are required of all heads of dioceses every five years and feature individual and group meetings with the pope. The U.S. visits are set to begin in March and conclude in December.

Typically, the pope uses the “ad limina” speeches to encourage hopeful trends and address problem areas in a specific country. It will be the first such encounters with U.S. prelates since the clerical sex abuse scandal rocked the church in the United States.

After a visit to Slovakia in September, the pope has no firm plans for foreign travel. There’s no lack of invitations: In 2004, he’s been asked to visit Switzerland in June, his native Poland sometime next summer, France in September, and Mexico for the International Eucharistic Congress in October.

But papal aides privately say they don’t know how much longer the pope will be able to travel. He no longer walks and can barely stand during public appearances, and he often appears tired and short of breath.

The important thing, papal advisers say, is for people to realize that the end of papal travel—whenever it comes—does not mean the end of the pontificate.

“From the outside, people see the trips as the biggest part of the pontificate, but that’s not really true in terms of content,” papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in an interview.

“The pope has certainly not exhausted the themes of his pontificate, and he will keep finding ways to develop these themes and express them. His pastoral creativity is still intact,” Navarro-Valls said.

The papal spokesman said he sees the pope returning to basic questions about the church’s structure in coming months, focusing in a particular way on the hierarchy and the role of the bishop.

For one thing, the pope is expected to publish a major document summarizing and reflecting on the 2001 Synod of Bishops, which had as its theme the role of the bishop in the church.

In a more personal vein, the pope has also been writing a book on his experience as a bishop in Poland. The volume, expected sometime over the next year, is likely to provide new material to the growing number of papal biographers.

Much of the pope’s liturgical and speech-giving activity is preordained these days. He has dozens of annual appointments with ambassadors, church groups and bishops from around the world, and he presides at more than 20 annual liturgical ceremonies at the Vatican and in Rome.