World leaders hail Pope as force for peace

LONDON, Sunday (Reuters) - World leaders mourned Pope John Paul, many hailing him as a force for peace across the globe while others credited him with a major role in the fall of the Iron Curtain.

From Brazil to the Philippines, South Africa to Germany, Roman Catholics prayed, wept and hugged each other in grief when news flashed across the globe on Saturday of the death of the Pope, whose 26-year reign was the third-longest pontificate.

"The Catholic Church has lost its shepherd. The world has lost a champion of human freedom," U.S. President George W. Bush said at the White House with his wife Laura beside him.

"We're grateful to God for sending such a man ... a hero for the ages," said Bush, who went to war in Iraq despite the Pope's opposition but who as a Christian shared other views with him. He ordered U.S. flags to fly at half-mast as a mark of respect. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said the Pope was a man of peace.

"He ... (was) extremely concerned about the world we lived in, and like me, he also felt that in war, all are losers." said Annan.

Lech Walesa, who led Poland's Solidarity movement which won power after a decade of struggle and hastened the collapse of the whole Soviet bloc, said Polish-born John Paul inspired the drive to end communism in Eastern Europe.

"(Without him) there would be no end of communism or at least much later and the end would have been bloody," Walesa said.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said the Pope was "humanitarian number one on the planet". Russian President Vladimir Putin said John Paul's "spiritual and political legacy have been deservedly valued by humanity".

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose country was once divided by the Iron Curtain, said: "By his efforts and through his impressive personality, (the Pope) changed our world." In the Pope's homeland, Poles wept and prayed in silence after his death, church bells tolled across the country and sirens wailed in the capital Warsaw.

"This is a terrible shock, I don't know what to say. He meant everything to us," said Maria Drapa, one of thousands who held a vigil in the Pope's home town of Wadowice.

In Madrid, several thousand people, mostly young, gathered in a square, holding candles, singing hymns and playing tambourines in front of pictures of the Pope. In Cologne, a heavily Catholic German city, hundreds packed its cathedral.