  We calculate the neutral pion photoproduction on the proton near threshold in
covariant baryon chiral perturbation theory, including the $\Delta(1232)$
resonance as an explicit degree of freedom, up to chiral order $p^{7/2}$ in the
$\delta$ counting. We compare our results with recent low-energy data from the
Mainz Microtron for angular distributions and photon asymmetries. The
convergence of the chiral series of the covariant approach is found to improve
substantially with the inclusion of the $\Delta(1232)$ resonance.
