Praise To The Late Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope Francis: Dear Statesman, Long Viewed In The Future

Pope Francis. (Wikimedia Commons/Paris Orlando)

JAKARTA - Pope Francis praised the late leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev as a statesman with a deep forward view, committed to improving relations between nations.

Pope Francis sent a message to Irina, Gorbachev's daughter, saying she was "close spiritually in her pain".

Pope Francis said his father, who died at the age of 91, was an honorable statesman.

In a message released by the Vatican, Pope Francis said he was grateful for "the commitment of Gorbachev's far view, for the harmony and brotherhood among the people, as well as for the progress of his own country at a time of important change."

Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday, traveled to the Vatican in December 1989, to hold a historic meeting with Pope John Paul II.

The first meeting between a Pope and a leader of the Soviet Union took place at the end of a fluctuating year, where the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Eastern European countries, including Poland, from Pope John Paul II, began to escape Moscow's grip.

Almost all of the former Soviet Republics, including Russia, now have diplomatic ties to the Vatican, just as have Eastern European countries ever been part of the Warsaw Pact.

As previously reported, he was praised in the West as the person who helped break down the Berlin Wall and end the Cold War without bloodshed, Mikhail Gorbachev broadly 'dritic' in the country as the Soviet Union's 'grave excavation'.

Gorbachev intends to revitalize the sclerotic Communist system through democratic and economic reforms, never intending to remove it.

The plan is for Gorbachev's funeral to be held on Saturday this week. He will be buried at the well-known Hall ofployees within the Moscow House of Unions, the same place Josef Stalin's body is buried.

Gorbachev will then be buried at Novodevichy Cemetery Moscow, TASS news agency quoted Vladimir Polyakov, press secretary for the Gorbachev Foundation, as saying.

Many high-level politicians, intellectuals, poets and nobles have been buried in the cemetery of Novodevichy since the funeral was founded in the 16th century.

Among them is Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first president and political rival Gorbachev. It is also the final resting place for Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, who died in 1999. The only Soviet leader besides Gorbachev who was buried there was Nikita Khrushchev. Most of the Soviet leaders were buried near the Kremlin wall on Red Square.