Pope Benedict XVI is planning numerous trips abroad in the coming year to the United Nations, Australia, Austria and a shrine in Lourdes, France, the Vatican spokesman said Sunday.In addition, the archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Sean O'Malley, has invited Benedict to visit Boston next year, saying it would help mend wounds from the clergy sexual abuse scandal.
The first of the pope's confirmed trips will be a Sept. 7-9 visit to Vienna where he plans to deliver an important speech to diplomats, the Rev. Federico Lombardi said, without elaborating.
He said plans were also under way for a papal trip next year to the shrine at Lourdes to mark the 150th anniversary of the apparition of the Madonna there. The trip will also be an emotional one, Lombardi said, since Pope John Paul II's last foreign trip was to Lourdes.
Millions of pilgrims have flocked to the town in the southwestern Pyrenees where an illiterate peasant girl, St. Bernadette, said she had visions of a white-clad Virgin Mary in 1858.
Lombardi said Benedict plans to travel to the U.N. headquarters in New York next year, though no date has been set.
Lombardi spoke on Italian state television as Benedict emerged to bless the faithful at his secluded mountain retreat here in Italy's Dolomite mountains near the Austrian border.
In his remarks, Benedict said the World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia, starts next July and he urged young people "from every continent" to make the trip, which he himself hopes to make.
Benedict was interrupted several times by chants of "Benedetto" by pilgrims who had hiked up a hill to the grounds of the 19th-century Mirabello castle to hear him speak. Benedict has been staying at a nearby refurbished chalet.
The Rev. Giuseppe Bratti, spokesman for the diocese, has said the pope has been keeping a "monastic" schedule during his retreat - writing, praying and reading in the morning and taking a walk each evening - often to a nearby shrine to pray.
This is the first summer Benedict has spent in Lorenzago since he was elected to the papacy in 2005; the previous two years he has spent time at a mountain retreat in Valle d'Aosta, on Italy's western border with France.
Benedict said as he arrived in Lorenzago on Monday that he hoped to start writing the second volume of his book "Jesus of Nazareth." He also said he would begin writing an encyclical, which Lombardi said would be based on a "social theme."
Media reports have suggested it would cover issues of globalization.
Benedict's only other encyclical "God is Love" was a meditation on love and charity.
Benedict plans to stay in Lorenzago until July 27, when he moves to the papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo, in the hills south of Rome.
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