Reagan used to regularly send generals to the Vatican to “tell the pope what was going on militarily,” Nicholson said.

WASHINGTON, April 4, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Pope John Paul II worked “very closely” with late US President Ronald Reagan for the eventual fall of communism and blessed Washington’s plans to put nuclear missiles across Western Europe, former US ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson has said.

“President Reagan used to send General (Vernon) Walters over there with live satellite photography showing how the Soviets were moving nuclear missiles further and further west, and the pope supported us in putting cruise missiles into Europe at that time, which few people know, but that was a very important part of that,” he told “FOX News Sunday,” on April 3.

Nicholson, the current secretary of veterans affairs, added that Walters, who spoke Polish, used to go to the Vatican “regularly and lay this out and tell the pope what was going on militarily.”

He asserted that the pontiff’s support for the American military build-up in Western Europe was “very important at the time, because the Western European leaders at that time had gotten pretty weak-kneed about bringing these missiles that President Carter had gotten made into Europe.”

Pope John Paul died Saturday, April 2, in his bed surrounded by his closest Polish aides.

US President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush will attend the pontiff’s funeral, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday, April 4.

Around 200 state and religious leaders are expected to attend the funeral, which Italian authorities say will draw up to two million mourners to Rome.

Cardinals who convened Monday for the first time since the pope’s death confirmed that he would be buried in St Peter's Basilica, in keeping with tradition, rather than his native Poland.

Indebted Poland

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski said his country was particularly indebted to the late pope, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“There would never have been a free Poland without a Polish pope,” he said in remarks after the pontiff's death.

The late pope revolutionised the papacy with many things, but perhaps his most lasting memorial was his contribution to the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, according to AFP.

The first non-Italian pontiff in 455 years, and the first pope from Eastern Europe, Karol Wojtyla helped inspire a workers' rebellion in his native Poland that became a model for anti-communist upheavals in the rest of Eastern Europe.

He lent his immense prestige to the outlawed trade union Solidarity in his native Poland, triggering a chain reaction that led to the fall, like dominoes, of the pro-Soviet regimes that had held half the continent in thrall for 40 years.

After he was elected pope in October 1978, the pope's first foreign visit was to his native Poland.

Despite Soviet warnings, the communist authorities were unable to head off the pope's visit, when he appeared before million-strong crowds speaking powerfully for human rights.

The upshot was a huge, reinvigorated anti-communist working class movement, the birth of Solidarity, and the steady thaw of the communist glacier that lay over central and eastern Europe.

Within hours of taking over the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980, an action that opened the way for the collapse of communism, Polish workers decorated the gate with a large photograph of the late pontiff.

The portrait was both symbol and talisman — a rejection of the godless ideology of Marxism and protection from the fury of the communist regime.

“Without the pope, there probably would have been no peaceful end of communism as we saw it in 1989,” said Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford University historian.

“Without the pope, there would have been no Solidarity movement; without Solidarity, there would have been no Gorbachev; without Gorbachev, there would have been no 1989. The pope was crucial at every stage.”

Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader, said under the pope, “the era of huge divisions, of communist systems, was relegated to the past.”