Pope Cancels Visit to U.S., Speech to U.N. : Religion: The Vatican says John Paul needs to recover from last spring’s surgery on his leg. The announcement is likely to fuel more rumors of ill health.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, and Pope John Paul II reluctantly heeded his doctors Thursday, scrapping a scheduled October trip to the United States and a speech to the United Nations.

The Vatican called it a postponement and said the Pope needs more time to fully recover from surgery last spring to repair a broken right leg.

Still, the cancellation can only serve to fuel rumors already rife at the Vatican that the 74-year-old pontiff is in failing health.

“It is exclusively because of his leg. It is a question of mobility, not health. There is no other reason,” spokesman Joaquin Navarro said. “The Holy Father will continue his full activities at the Vatican in a busy month ahead.”

While Vatican and American planners had begun pruning back the Pope’s U.S. schedule, the cancellation came as a surprise. It underlined concerns for one of the most vigorous pontiffs--and the most widely traveled--in history.

“Doctors said it would be better not to tire him out too much, to give the leg a chance to fully heal,” Navarro said. The trip is now at least nominally postponed until November, 1995.

Church sources say John Paul has been a fitful and impatient therapy patient. Over the summer he is said not to have worked as hard at rehabilitating leg muscles as therapists who visit him daily would have liked.

The Pope, who has been walking with obvious difficulty despite the aid of a cane, was to have flown to New York on Oct. 20 for an address to the U.N. General Assembly.

Plans called for him to meet President Clinton there and on successive days to preside at outdoor masses and celebrations at Shea Stadium and Yonkers Raceway in New York; at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, and at Camden Yards in Baltimore.

John Paul, who tripped last Nov. 11 and broke his right shoulder, fell in his Vatican bathroom April 28, breaking his right leg at the hip. He appeared early in the summer to have made good progress from surgery in which a prosthesis was inserted to replace the shattered head of his thigh bone.

Since the Pope returned from a mountain vacation at the end of August, however, he has walked with increasing difficulty, alarming aides and onlookers alike during a Sept. 10-11 visit to Croatia and on a 24-hour pastoral call last weekend in the southern Italian city of Lecce.

Navarro said the Pope had heeded with disappointment but good humor his doctors’ urgings to abandon the U.S. trip. The doctors are confident that the Pope will fully recover within the six-month postoperative period they originally foresaw, Navarro said.

Raymond L. Flynn, U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, said the Clinton Administration regrets the cancellation.

“He would have been received warmly by Catholics and non-Catholics alike for his moral leadership,” Flynn said.

The two broken bones in five months and John Paul’s grim visage of late have contributed to rumors of his increasing ill health. In recent months, the Vatican has been forced to deny reports that the Polish pontiff has Parkinson’s disease, that he has bone cancer, that he is prone to fainting spells.

John Paul was to have gone to Sicily on the day he broke his leg last spring. Subsequently, he was forced to cancel a trip to Belgium and, for security reasons, a hoped-for visit to Sarajevo, the capital of war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Now, Navarro said, the Pope hopes to resume travels that have taken him to more than 100 countries with a weekend visit to Sicily in early November and a long trip to Asia in January.