PLOVDIV, Bulgaria - With Pope John Paul II increasingly frail, the Vatican suggested for the first time Sunday that it may have to cut back on the 82-year-old pontiff's future trips, indicating that planned visits to Mexico and Guatemala could be dropped.
John Paul will go to Toronto in July to mark the Catholic Church's World Youth Day, papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said, but he suggested the Vatican was carefully evaluating whether the ailing pope could handle the other stops on the proposed 11-day trip.
"Toronto is clear. For the others, we shall see," Navarro-Valls told reporters. "No decision has been made yet. Everything that has been confirmed is confirmed."
But he added: "Something that has been confirmed can be unconfirmed."
Throughout his 24-year papacy, the only trips postponed because of John Paul's ill health were a 1994 visit to New York after the pontiff broke his leg and a trip to Armenia in 1999 after he came down with the flu.
According to the Vatican, John Paul has visited more than 140 countries on 96 different trips, traveled nearly three times the distance between the Earth and the moon and has spent about 10 percent of his time outside of the Vatican.
Despite persistent questions about the pope's ailing health and flagging strength, the Vatican had insisted as recently as Saturday that no changes would be made to his travel schedule. Underscoring how sensitive the issue is, Navarro-Valls issued a statement later Sunday stressing that no decision on the Mexico and Guatemala legs had been made.
Winding up a taxing four-day Bulgaria trip Sunday with an outdoor Mass in the southern city of Plovdiv, the pope sat slumped in a white chair on the altar, looking feeble. His hands trembled and his voice was heavily slurred, symptoms of Parkinson's disease.
Although he has difficulty walking and has been wheeled around on a special platform, Navarro-Valls denied there were any plans to use a wheelchair on future trips.
As he did throughout the Bulgarian visit and on a preceding stop in Azerbaijan, the pope read only a portion of his homily, turning it over to a priest to finish.
But the pope's final event before returning to Rome - a meeting with Catholic youths at a church in Plovdiv - appeared to energize him, as his encounters with young people so often do. An alert John Paul waved repeatedly and reached out to touch some of the several hundred wildly cheering and weeping youths.
"I'm glad to meet young people at the end of my visit to Bulgaria. Tomorrow belongs to you," the pope said in Polish. He added: "Probably it's my last trip to Bulgaria."
Showing his spirit despite his infirmities, the pope invited the journalists traveling with him to come up to the front of the plane, one by one, and pose with him for photographs before the Alitalia airliner carrying the entourage left for Rome.
The plane landed in Rome shortly before 8 p.m., and the pope again used a mechanical lift to disembark, avoiding the stairs. He used the lift for the first time when he departed Rome on Wednesday.
In Bulgaria, about 20,000 people attended the Mass in Plovdiv's main square, where security was particularly heavy: Sharpshooters were perched on rooftops and the windows of overlooking buildings were covered.
Two Orthodox church officials who had accepted the pope's invitation stood beside him, an encouraging sign for the Vatican, which has been seeking closer contacts as part of efforts to heal a millennium-old rift between Catholics and Orthodox believers. Disputes between the two faiths have thwarted the pope's longtime hopes of visiting Russia.
The pope honored three Catholic priests killed by Bulgaria's former communist regime, finding bonds with Orthodox Christians in their joint suffering during the Cold War.
He beatified Kamen Vichev, Iosafat Shishkov and Pavel Dzhidzhov, all executed by firing squad in a Sofia prison in 1952 on trumped-up charges of spying, declaring them martyrs of the Catholic faith. Beatification is the last step before possible sainthood.
They were close to Evgeni Bosilkov, Bulgaria's Catholic leader at the time, who was sentenced to death in the same trial. The pope beatified Bosilkov five years ago.
The pope said he felt "duty bound" to also honor the memory of Orthodox Christians "who suffered martyrdom under the same communist regime."
"This tribute of fidelity of Christ brought together the two ecclesial communities in Bulgaria, even to the supreme witness," the pope said in his homily.
He said the three martyred priests were models for Christians today, especially young people "who are looking to give meaning to their lives."