US: President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush will attend the funeral of Pope John Paul II on Friday, the White House announced yesterday.
Mr Bush, the first sitting US president to attend a papal funeral, said he would lead the US delegation to celebrate the life of a "courageous, moral and godly man".
The death of the Pope has provoked an extraordinary outpouring of affection in the United States from all sides, with cable news providing blanket coverage of events at the Vatican.
A majority of Americans expressed their admiration for Pope John Paul in a poll which showed that 51 per cent - and 75 per cent of Catholics - believe he will be remembered as one of the greatest popes.
At the same time, the AP-Ipsos poll revealed that the Catholic faithful are divided, and that a majority disagreed with the late Pope's conservative teachings on moral questions. Some 69 per cent said that priests should be allowed to marry, and 64 per cent that women should become priests, while six in 10 Catholics supported both these steps.
"About 75 per cent of Catholics do not follow the teachings of the church on birth control," said Carl Bernstein, author of the book His Holiness, adding that most Catholics feel "restive and uncomfortable" in the church.
More than four in five Americans polled - and about the same proportion of Catholics - said they wanted to see the next Pope do more to address the problem of priests sexually abusing children.
In the last two years the church in the US has toughened its stance on abuse, introducing victim outreach, removing hundreds of priests and paying huge sums in litigation.
In going to Rome for the funeral, President Bush will be paying tribute to a figure with whom he is closer on issues such as life and the sanctity of marriage than are many leading Catholic politicians.
The Pope may have contributed to Mr Bush's re-election by influencing the votes of Catholics, who make up 27 per cent of the electorate.
During the 2004 presidential campaign, American Catholics supported Mr Bush, an evangelical Christian, over Senator John Kerry, a Catholic, by 52 to 47 per cent, according to exit polls.
Church-going Catholics supported Mr Bush by 56 to 43 per cent.
At the height of the campaign, a number of bishops discouraged Catholics from voting for Mr Kerry because of the Democratic Party candidate's support for abortion rights.
US Catholic bishops, after taking advice from the Vatican, voted 183-6 for a statement which said that Catholic institutions "should not honour those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles" - a move which excluded Mr Kerry from making speeches in major Catholic universities.
Archbishop Raymond Burke of St Louis, Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs and Bishop John Myers of Newark warned Catholics that the obligation to oppose abortion outweighed any other issue in the election. Mr Kerry argued that he could not take an article of faith for himself and legislate it for someone with a different faith.
The major difference between Pope John Paul and Mr Bush occurred over the US-led invasion of Iraq, which the Pope opposed.
"Of course, he was a man of peace and he didn't like war, and I fully understood that," Mr Bush said yesterday.
The US president met Pope John Paul three times during his presidency. At their last meeting, in June last year, the Pope said that he had "grave concern" about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US troops as well as about Mr Bush's support for the death penalty.
Mr Bush will leave Washington tomorrow to travel to Rome and he will then be flown to Texas to welcome Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon there on Monday.
Asked whether former presidents George Bush snr and Bill Clinton would be part of the US delegation to the funeral, his spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that the White House was still finalising the list.