Pope Benedict hints at less papal travel

ROME - Pope Benedict has made his first papal trip outside the Vatican -- but he is already hinting that he won't be globetrotting as much as his predecessor.

A week into his papacy, Benedict journeyed just a few kilometres from the tiny Vatican City state to the reputed tomb of St. Paul the Apostle in the southern suburbs of Rome on Monday on his first official outing since his election.

He used the visit to the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, the reputed burial place of Christianity's first missionary, to pledge the Roman Catholic Church to a renewed evangelising mission in its quest for more followers.

Pope John Paul played a central role in that mission as by far the most travelled pontiff in history, with visits to 129 countries on 104 trips outside Italy during his 26-year reign.

But he was 20 years younger than Benedict, the 78-year-old German former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, on his election in 1978 and his successor said his record could prove unbeatable.

"The example of my beloved and venerated predecessor John Paul II is before our eyes," Benedict told the packed congregation at the huge basilica.

"He was a missionary Pope and his intense activity, witnessed by more than 100 apostolic journeys beyond the borders of Italy, is truly inimitable," he said.

Benedict, the oldest man elected Pope since 1730, confirmed at an audience for several thousand of the German pilgrims who attended his inauguration on Sunday that he hoped to visit Cologne, Germany, in August for a Catholic youth gathering.

German news reports say he told Edmund Stoiber, the premier of his home state of Bavaria, at his inauguration that he hopes to go there too during the same trip. Any other travel plans are still unclear, but no one expects Benedict to be jetting round the world at the same pace as John Paul before illness and age took their toll.

"I don't think he will travel much," Bishop Cipriano Calderon Polo, a retired Vatican official who knows the new Pope, told Reuters after he was elected on April 19.

Benedict's elder brother, 81-year-old Georg Ratzinger, has even suggested that his sibling may be too old for the office.

"At age 78 it's not good to take on such a job which challenges the entire person and the physical and mental existence," Georg Ratzinger, who is also a priest, said shortly before his brother's election.

"At an age when you approach 80 it's no longer guaranteed that one is able to work and get up the next day," he said.

His brother's doubts aside, Benedict is already showing a more pastoral side as Pope as he sheds the image of stern authority that enveloped him during his 23 years as John Paul's chief enforcer of doctrinal orthodoxy.

Both at the basilica and at the audience for German pilgrims, he appeared increasingly at ease with the adulation that awaits him as leader of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics.

Smiling and touching pilgrims' outstretched hands, he kissed a baby held out to him inside St. Paul's and proved himself John Paul's match in terms of humour with his first papal joke.

Apologising for his late arrival at the audience, he quipped in German that he might have lost his teutonic punctuality after too many years in Rome. "It seems I've become a bit of an Italian," he joked to laughter and cheers.

- REUTERS