Second Coming.(Vicente Fox's religion)

To most Mexicans, their new straight-talking, cowboy-boot-wearing, 6- foot-4-inch president is a practical businessman who will dedicate himself to fighting crime and poverty. But to the group of Roman Catholic seminary students seated around a lunch table with the new Red Hot Chili Peppers CD playing in the background, Vicente Fox represents something much greater: the second coming of the church. "Fox and his family have always gone to church. He can put its values into practice in society," says Fernando Gomez Castaneda, 19, who has wanted to be a priest since grade school. Fox hails from the buckle of Mexico's Bible belt, belongs to a party that has long sympathized with the church, and courted the support of the clergy during his campaign to dethrone the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) after seven unbroken decades in power. At the National Auditorium last month, on the day Fox took power, his teen-age daughter Paulina rushed onto the stage at the conclusion of his speech and handed him a two-foot-long crucifix.

None of this may seem extraordinary in a country in which 88 percent of people count themselves as Catholics, except that it has been more than a century since any president proclaimed his faith so openly, and Mexican society has never been so divided over the doctrine of the church. Unlike the rest of Latin America, Mexico is passionately secular, and until recently the country had some of the world's strictest laws dividing church and state. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church--from the top-ranking officials to the 18 students at the San Agustin Seminary in Mexico City--have great hopes for the president. But both his personal life and his political sensibility suggest that a Catholic renaissance is not on his agenda. He is weighing the possibility of skirting the church's rules by formally ending his marriage from his long-estranged wife to marry his press secretary. More importantly, he is pragmatic enough to know that it would be political suicide to try to legislate God into public life.

The seminary students see Fox as a chance for the church to assert its influence on a broad range of issues--from instituting prayer in public schools to keeping abortion illegal to allowing religious orders to own radio and television networks. With a desire to save the country from a spiritual vacuum and stand up to the forces of globalization, the students--or at least those who graduate from the seminary, since two thirds drop out--may be the revolutionaries of their generation. "In a certain way, we are rebels," says Gomez. "Small groups--homosexuals, pro-abortion activists--try to impose their views on the majority. Many of these activists are Catholic. They are baptized and confirmed, but they don't take that into account anymore."

His targets include his own cousin, Gabriel Rivera Conde, a third-year law student who considers himself agnostic. "Fernando was brilliant in school. He's wasting his talents," says Rivera, 20, who has adopted what he calls a "yin-yang philosophy of God," which roughly holds that God is an idea and not a being. "Religion is an invention of men. It is a means of controlling the individual," he says. He too voted for Fox but worries that the new president will give the church more political sway.

Mexico has nearly 90 million Catholics, the second-highest number in the world behind Brazil. Crosses abound along the highways, marking the spots of fatal accidents, rosary beads hang from rear-view mirrors, and cliff divers in Acapulco pray to the country's patron saint, Our Lady the Virgin of Guadalupe, before they leap into the ocean. But while the seminary students are unwavering in their opposition to birth control-- "it reduces sex to an animal act," says one--some 70 percent of women use it. Though abortion is illegal in most cases, there is a growing movement to loosen restrictions, and the best estimates show that an average of 2,300 are performed each day. The divorce rate has doubled over the last two decades, and sex before marriage has become widely accepted. In the capital, legislators are planning to introduce a bill allowing gay marriage.

Mexican society can be an unfriendly place for men aspiring to the priesthood. As a first-year law student from a devoutly Catholic family, Noe Esau Garcia Valencia rarely shared his religious beliefs with classmates. When he suggested to a friend that adoption was always a better option than abortion--even in cases of rape--she called him "anti-woman." One of his best friends, Pablo Toledo, told him that priests are opportunists. In an interview, 27-year-old Toledo, who was raised as a Catholic, says: "The church doesn't give me much faith. I believe in God, but in my own way." Garcia left school in the middle of the second semester to join the San Agustin Seminary, telling his friends only that he was transferring to another university.

When they talk about the United States, the future priests at San Agustin sound like the old left, not the religious right. Garcia, now 21, blames the United States for the values his friends have adopted: "You can't change that. We are next to a developed country that is spreading its influence." He and his fellow seminarians decry the culture of brand names and status, the desire for all things American and the apparently widening gap between rich and poor that has accompanied free trade. "There is a certain attraction to this life in the church," says Israel Ramirez, 18, who knew for years that he wanted to be priest. "For all the consumerism and materialism in Mexico, this is a more ordered life." He evokes images of a 1960s radical with his talk about the need for social justice and the responsibility of the church to represent the lower classes, which remain its most devoted followers. "Rich people think they don't lack anything," he says. "But this happiness is a disguise."