Pope marks 80th birthday with concert

VATICAN CITY --Pope Benedict XVI marked his 80th birthday Monday by lunching with cardinals and listening to music by one of his favorite composers -- Mozart -- in a relatively low-key celebration in keeping with the quiet pace of what he has said would be a "short" papacy.

Benedict spent the morning meeting with well-wishers from his native Germany, including the governors of Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein, and a representative of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians.

Gifts poured in, including 80 bottles of Bavarian beer from the archdiocese of Munich, a birthday cake from some seminarians in Rome, and a giant stuffed teddy bear, which the pontiff donated to a local children's hospital.

Benedict, a trained pianist, attended a Mozart concert in his honor Monday evening in a Vatican auditorium.

"In looking back on my life, I thank God for having placed music next to me, almost like a traveling companion," Benedict said at the end of the concert.

On Sunday, Benedict celebrated Mass on the steps of St. Peter's Basilica. The Vatican post office issued a special postcard and postmark.

The Vatican generally does not give out information about the pope's health, citing his privacy. Except for an occasional cough, though, the pope appears healthy and robust and in two years has never skipped a planned event for health reasons.

Nevertheless, the passing of the milestone -- he is now five years older than the normal mandatory retirement age for bishops -- raised questions about the future of the papacy.

Benedict himself has said that being pope is "really tiring" and, in an interview with German television last August, said he does not feel strong enough to take many long trips.

When Pope John Paul II was in his later years and clearly suffering from Parkinson's disease, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger once suggested that there might come a time when popes have to retire.

In a February 2004 interview with the Italian religious affairs weekly Famiglia Cristiana, Ratzinger said he would not rule out term limits for popes because they are living longer now than ever before.

"The pope is selected for life because he is a father and his paternity goes before his function," Ratzinger was quoted then as saying. "Perhaps in the future, with life being prolonged, one also would consider new norms."

A year later, after his election as pope, Benedict himself predicted to the cardinals who elected him that his would be a "short reign." And at the time of his election, his brother Georg expressed concern about the toll the job would take on him.

Benedict has kept the pace slow, limiting his foreign and domestic travel and cutting back on ceremonial and bureaucratic appearances.

Benedict does have some taxing travel coming up, including a May 9-14 trip to Brazil. It will be his first visit to the Americas.

And he has some expected documents in the works, including a letter to Catholics in China and a document expected to liberalize the use of the old Latin Mass, as well as the second volume of a book on the life of Jesus Christ. Volume one came out on Monday.

In the pope's Bavarian birthplace, Marktl am Inn, some 300 people gathered for prayers in front of the house where he was born at 4:15 a.m., marking the exact time of his birth.

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Associated Press writer Daniela Petroff contributed to this report.