VATICAN CITY - Pope John Paul II put lobbying against gay marriage at the top of the Vatican's agenda for 2005 and also urged politicians in prosperous nations Monday to do more for the millions of hungry people around the globe.

In a speech to the diplomats accredited to the Vatican, the ailing, 84-year-old pontiff laid out the Roman Catholic Church's priorities for the new year, making clear he intended to use his energies to tackle what he called "challenges of life" issues - abortion, cloning, gay marriage, assisted procreation and embryonic stem cell use.

He noted the anguishing news of 2004, from natural disasters - including the Indian Ocean tsunami and locust plagues in northern Africa - to "barbarous terrorism which caused bloodshed in Iraq and other countries," and the suffering in Darfur, Sudan.

While the pope was delivering his annual speech to the ambassadors, the Italian cardinal he sent to the White House in March 2003 in a last-hour bid to dissuade President Bush from invading Iraq war told TV viewers in Italy the president had promised the prelate the American intervention would be wrapped up quickly.

Cardinal Pio Laghi said Bush "told me, 'Don't worry, your eminence. We'll be quick and do well in Iraq.'"

Laghi, who was speaking on Telepace, a Catholic TV station, was the Vatican's first envoy to the United States in the 1980s and established a friendship with Bush's father, former President George H.W. Bush.

"Unfortunately, the facts have demonstrated afterward that things took a different course - not rapid and not favorable" in Iraq, the cardinal said.

"Bush was wrong" about Iraq, the prelate, now retired, said of the current U.S. leader.

John Paul, who had vigorously opposed what the United States called "preventive war," said in his speech that "arrogance of power must be countered with reason, force with dialogue, pointed weapons with outstretched hands, evil with good."

In an obvious reference to laws permitting marriage between homosexuals or equating the social rights of unwed couples to married ones, John Paul said that in some countries, the family's "natural structure" has been challenged.

Families "must necessarily be that of a union between a man and a woman founded on marriage," he said.

John Paul also reasserted the church's opposition to abortion, assisted procreation and scientific research on human embryonic stem cells.

"The human embryo is a subject identical to the human being, which will be born at the term of its development," the pope said.