Under the presidency of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the constitutional Convention of the European Union - on which I represent the European Liberals - is reaching a point of no return. The Convention has been conducting a rich debate on the future of the Union matched by a searching examination of its past and present performance. We have asked and sought to answer the federal question: what should the Union be doing, who should do it, and how. The serious drafting process will begin shortly, in the expectation of which members of the Convention are being assailed by all sorts of proposals from many directions. One of the strangest interventions comes from the Pope, or at least from those, mainly from Poland and Italy, who represent his views in the Convention.

The Vatican is asking the Convention to write into the new EU Constitution an invocation of God. It would wish us to say something on the lines that Christendom is the source of European integration. This poses several problems.

One of the main driving forces behind the Convention is to prepare the Union for enlargement first to ten, then to thirteen and possibly more new member states. Representatives of the candidate countries participate in the Convention (although they will not be able to block a consensus among the existing members). Turkey is among them, and Turkish conventionnels have not been afraid to make the obvious point that there are already many religions in the present EU and the future admission of a secular, mainly Moslem state such as Turkey will not be helped by the writing into primary law of allegiance to Christendom. Even if we tried to invoke a single God on behalf of the three faiths of Abraham - a multi-purpose Jehovah and Allah - other faiths, humanists and atheists would all have cause to object.

There is more than a suspicion that the right-wing in some countries want to define Europe as Christian precisely in order to keep out the Turks and much of the Balkans. This is a wholly objectionable motive. The criteria for joining the EU comprise respect for the rule of law, adherence to fundamental rights, liberal democracy and a market economy. These are not geographical or historical criteria, but universal. Democracy began in Athens well before Christ. Fundamental rights were forged often in conflict with the spiritual and temporal might of the Church. God gave us graces and duties. Man won rights. I am not competent to comment on the Pope's theology, but his politics are flawed.