The New Crusade; Fighting for God in a secular Europe, conservative Christians, the Vatican and Islamic militants find a common cause.(Cover Story)

Byline: Carla Power (With Barbie Nadeau in Rome, Mike Elkin in Madrid, Joanna Kowalska in Warsaw and Marie Valla in London)

Once upon a time, when the European Union was a simple common market, matters of faith were left to individual consciences and confessionals. But in 1992 the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, called for "a soul for Europe," arguing that if Brussels wasn't able to inject a spiritual dimension into the EU, it would fail to command the allegiance of its citizens.

How ironic, then, that last week a battle over the soul of Europe tripped up the European Commission. After Rocco Buttiglione, the conservative Roman Catholic nominee for the Justice portfolio, pronounced homosexuality to be a "sin" and unwed mothers "bad," the outcry from parliamentarians forced its incoming president, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, to withdraw his entire slate of commissioners.

In truth, the Buttiglione affair has less to do with religion than with the aspirations of a European Parliament yearning to assert itself (sidebar). But his supporters instantly framed it as a religious witch hunt. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi thundered that the attack "smells of fundamentalism, if not obscurantism." Tellingly, Barroso backed down just two days before EU leaders gathered to sign the new European Constitution, which despite strenuous lobbying from Christians contains no mention of God or Christianity. "It has been said that the European Constitution could not speak of the Judeo-Christian roots of Europe because it would offend Islam," says Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. "But that which offends Islam is a lack of respect for God and the arrogance of reason."

And so the battle lines are drawn. For Europe, the clash of civilizations is less between "Islam" and "the West" than between muscular religiosity and militant secularism. With the collapse of communism, Europe's religious conservatives--Catholic or Muslim--now see secularism as their chief enemy. To the naked eye, the secularists appear to have won. Western European pews are empty. Church membership is plummeting. Families are shrinking, breaking up and evolving as parliaments pass laws to pave the way for gay marriages. Fantasies of a Christian Europe have been dealt a blow by surging immigration and the EU's nod to Turkish accession earlier this month; the religious vigor of many of Europe's 30 million-odd Muslims stands in marked contrast to the apathy of the Christian flock. Writes Catholic theologian George Weigel: "European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular."

But Europe's religionists are fighting back. In the vanguard is the Catholic Church, emboldened by conservatives from new member states like Poland, Slovakia and Malta. It's even trying to forge new alliances with Muslims and moderate secularists, arguing that Europe, in moral crisis, must embrace a new ethics founded in "natural law"--or, as one of Cardinal Ratzinger's aides puts it, "find common ethical norms to save democracy and the weak from the whims of the powerful."

Where it once shunned grubby politicking in Brussels, the church is now lobbying for more formal rights with European institutions. Religious conservatives lost the skirmish over God in the Constitution, but they may have won a larger victory. Embedded in the document is Article 51, allowing churches an "open, transparent and regular dialogue" with the European Union. Church members say that's merely democracy in action. Moderate Catholics and secularists fear the clause will give the church undue influence over European legislation.