It’s never too early to start speculating about the next pope. The Paris daily Le Figaro seems to be the first out of the starting blocks with an article on Friday saying that Pope Benedict appeared tired during his U.S. tour and has been delegating more and more of his duties. “Three years after the election of Benedict XVI, his succession is not yet a daily issue at the Vatican but the rumours are rife,“ Rome correspondent Hervé Yannou wrote. “It’s true that he celebrated his 81st birthday on April 16 and everybody knows his health is fragile. The sovereign pontiff still climbs the stairs and is mentally alert, but he’s as old as his years. And it’s no secret for anyone that the pope has a weak heart.”

Perhaps to calm any concern the article might stir up, Yannou promptly says Benedict still plans to visit France on September 12-15, where he will celebrate a large outdoor mass at Les Invalides in Paris and visit the sanctuary at Lourdes. After a bit more background, he returns to the succession issue and names Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (photo below left), 74, as the front-runner. If the cardinal electors lean towards a non-European, Yannou’s pick is Cardinal Jorge Maria Bergoglio, 72, the Jesuit Archbishop of Buenos Aires who emerged as the main alternative to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now B16) at the 2005 conclave.

The reason for this speculation may have less to do with Benedict’s health than the fact that another “papabile” (pope candidate) has all but thrown his hat into the papal succession ring. On April 14, the day before Benedict left for Washington, Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, 65, published a book in France entitled De la difficulté d’évoquer Dieu dans un monde qui pense ne pas en avoir besoin (The difficulty of evoquing God in a world that thinks it doesn’t need him). In it, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa (photo below right), who was considered a long-shot papabile back in 2005, wrote about the possibility of a non-European pope. This pontiff should be a “man of the 21st century” who embodies both tradition and innovation and whose knowledge of the concerns of the Third World would mean he could influence North-South relations, he wrote in what sounded very much like a self-description and job description rolled into one. French reporters covering Benedict’s U.S. visit briefly discussed the book one day in the press centre, but it didn’t sound like the start of the succession speculation season.

“Certainly, the pope is 81 years old,” said Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, head of the Vatican Press Office, told John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter. “But on live television, before the eyes of the whole world, anyone can see that he’s fine and is performing all of his duties.” Allen said the article illustrated “an iron-clad rule of Vatican coverage: however thin the pretext may be, speculation about the next pope is always guaranteed to generate an audience.”

Andrea Tornielli of Il Giornale noted that Benedict, following his U.S. visit, had celebrated a funeral, would preside over a long ceremony on Sunday and planned trips in the coming months to northern Italy, southern Italy, Australia and France. “Il Giornale has confirmed there is no (health) alarm,” he wrote.

On his blog, Tornielli asked whether reluctant vaticanisti were now going to have to write more and more papal health stories. Only three years ago, he recalled, the death of Pope John Paul II ended a difficult decade in which Vatican reporters had to write frequently about health issues and medical false alarms. “What’s coming from France is an ugly signal — is it already starting again?” he asked.

(Update: Zenit has more on the Vatican denial here.)

What do you think about speculation like this? Is it irreverent, given that Benedict seems in good health for his age? Or should Vatican reporters follow up any lead like this?

Shortly after Pope Benedict was elected in April, 2005, he made it clear that he would not be travelling as much as his globe-trotting predecessor John Paul II. He has made only seven trips outside Italy so far, most of them short, unlike some of John Paul’s marathon journeys that sometimes lasted up to two weeks. Benedict’s shortest was one day, to Spain, and the longest was five days in Brazil.

Now it seems that Benedict is looking increasingly to his Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, to be not only his deputy pope inside the Vatican walls but also his deputy traveller on the world stage. Bertone has just wound up a significant and news-making trip to Cuba, which coincided with Fidel Castro’s decision to step down as president and hand over the reins to his younger brother Raul. The Vatican treated Bertone’s visit almost as a papal visit, sending text of all of the some 20 speeches and sermons he made to reporters via e-mail and its Web site. On the final day of Bertone’s visit, they issued four speeches (speeches in Spanish and Italian here).

Bertone, who had no diplomatic experience before he was named secretary of state to succeed Cardinal Angelo Sodano, is a close friend of the pope. He worked with the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger when the future pope was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The highlight of Bertone’s trip, which took place on the 10th anniversary of Pope John Paul’s historic visit to Cuba in 1998, was his meeting with the new President Raul Castro. He did just about everything a pope would have done on a papal trip — he met the head of state, said masses, visited seminaries and local churches. The only thing he did that a pope would not normally do was hold news conferences.

Just as Bertone was putting Cuba under his cardinal’s sash, the Vatican announced on Feb 26 that he would make a visit to Armenia and Azerbaijan on March 2-9. A statement, here in Italian, said the trip would allow Bertone to “show the closeness of the Holy Father Benedict to the Catholic faithful of those countries.”

The Italian media gave a high profile to Bertone’s trip to Cuba and some Italian journalists who normally cover the Vatican, including La Repubblica’s Marco Politi, travelled to the island to cover it as they would have for a papal trip. Watch this space for more travels by the deputy-pope-cum-deputy-traveller.