MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Differences set aside.

On a cloudy day in early spring, a rhythmic chant rose up in St Peter's Square from crowds of mourners at Pope John Paul II's funeral.

"Santo subito! Santo subito!" they called out, as if in a sports stadium. Translated from Italian, the words mean "Make him a saint immediately".

The Roman Catholic Church, the centre of the world's attention on Friday as its 1.1bn faithful put aside their differences and closed ranks in celebration of John Paul's life, seems certain to oblige.

Yet the canonisation of Karol Wojtyla, the tailor's son from southern Poland who went on to rule the Church for 26 years, longer than all but two of his 263 predecessors, will be a relatively simple task compared with the challenges that will face John Paul's successor.

Monarchs, presidents, religious leaders and millions across the world paid their last respects on Friday to Pope John Paul II, who was buried in St Peter's Basilica after one of the largest funerals in history.

As choirs sang in Latin and a giant bell tolled across Vatican City, 12 pall-bearers took John Paul's plain cypress coffin, adorned with a cross and the letter M for Mary, to the crypt below St Peter's Basilica.

In St Peter's Square, the huge piazza where the Pope was wounded by a Turkish gunman in 1981, police estimated that 300,000 people crammed in.

But even these numbers paled into insignificance against the millions who watched the rites on large screens in Rome's largest piazzas, and the many millions more, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who followed the event on television. George W. Bush, the US president, joined dozens of other heads of state and government including Tony Blair, UK prime minister, French president Jacques Chirac and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to pay their last respects. It was the first time a US president has attended a papal funeral. The ceremony also provided an opportunity for dramatic, if brief, moments of diplomacy. Moshe Katsav, the Israeli president, shook hands with the leaders of his country's bitter enemies, Syria's Bashar al-Assad and Iran's Mohammad Khatami.

Syrian officials usually try hard to avoid public contact with Israelis. But yesterday's handshake with Mr Katsav comes as Syria faces unprecedented international isolation over its role in Lebanon and ahead of Monday's visit by Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, to Washington.

Britain's Prince Charles, meanwhile, was caught off guard and shook the hand of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who has vilified the UK in his efforts to extend his 24-year rule.

Mr Blair has a different problem. Since he has called an election in the UK, he is prevented from agreeing any issues of substance with his foreign counterparts. But if past form is anything to go by, he will want to touch base with his colleagues.

Among the chief issues worrying European leaders is the uncertain fate of the European constitution, which faces difficult referendums in France and the Netherlands in coming weeks

Mr Mugabe defied an EU travel ban, imposed on him and his senior ministers for flouting democracy, to attend the funeral.

Latin American leaders, meanwhile, are concerned about relations with the US, which is often perceived as having scaled down its interest in the rest of the continent after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001.

But the world's leaders need not despair. In Moscow on May 9 there will be another assembly of presidents and politicians, almost as impressive as the Rome event, to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

With exceptional security measures in place for the 200 world leaders who flew into Rome, airspace closed and the noisy, chaotic city emptied of traffic, the funeral passed off without disturbances. However, Italy scrambled F-16 jets to force down one aircraft near Rome, while police in Serbia-Montenegro stopped another on the ground. They acted on a tip-off by an unidentified foreign government that they could be carrying bombs