Vatican: pope's wrist healing well

Doctors examined Pope Benedict XVI's broken wrist at the pontiff's Alpine vacation chalet and are pleased with how the injury is healing, a Vatican spokesman said Saturday.

During the half-hour checkup, the cast on the fractured right wrist was removed and a new one put on, the Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement.

The 82-year-old pope had surgery at the hospital on July 17 on his right wrist, which he fractured in a fall in the chalet near Aosta.

Doctors from Aosta hospital as well as Vatican doctors carried out medical and radiological exams at the chalet in the mountains near the French border, Lombardi said.

The exams yielded "excellent results," said Lombardi.

"The (healing) process is good and is in line with what was expected," the spokesman said.

Vatican CTV television captured some of the pope's chatting with his doctors, the Italian news agency ANSA reported from the vacation retreat.

"Well, then, doctor, thanks. Let's hope that all is going well," the pope was overheard telling Dr. Manuel Mancini, the orthopedist who had done the surgery, ANSA said. "It's all going very well. Now we're just awaiting the X-ray results,'" the doctor replied. "It will be satisfactory, we hope," the pope was heard saying. "It will surely be satisfactory," Mancini was quoted as replying.

At noon Sunday, Benedict will recite prayers and greet the public on a meadow outside the chalet, after local bishops celebrate Mass.

Among the doctors involved in Saturday's checkup was a Rome hospital orthopedist who will continue the pope's care when he returns to Castel Gandolfo, the Vatican holiday retreat near Rome, as well as when he is back in the Vatican, Lombardi said.

Traditionally, the pope spends much of the summer at the Castel Gandolfo palace in the lakeside hill town after a briefer holiday in the cool mountains in Italy's north.

Local pastry chefs told Italian TV they had sent a strudel and raspberry and pistachio torte to the German-born pope's chalet in Les Combes in the Val d'Aosta region, where the pontiff is scheduled to stay until July 29.

A local cleric told TV the pope's aides had asked for deliveries of small baskets of blueberries, blackberries and other berries, for which the region is famed. The pope's kitchen was also being stocked with various kinds of lettuce from a garden planted by disabled people outside the chalet.