Today, state churches throughout the world are characterized by their fatigue.

At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.

Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives.

Children are seen as a liability — rather than as a source of hope. There is a clear comparison between today's situation and the decline of the Roman Empire.

In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted.

There are two opposing diagnoses on the possible future of Europe. On the one hand, there is the thesis of Oswald Spengler, who believed that he had identified a natural law for the great moments in cultural history.

First came the birth of a culture, then its gradual rise, flourishing, slow decline, aging — and death. Spengler argued his thesis with ample documentation, culled from the history of cultures that demonstrated the law of the natural life cycle.

His thesis was that the West would come to an end — and that it was rushing heedlessly toward its demise, despite every effort to stop it.

Europe could of course bequeath its gifts to a new emerging culture — following the example set by previous cultures during their decline — but as a historical subject its life cycle had effectively ended.

The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that the moral and religious question that Marxism used to address has been almost totally repressed.

Spengler's "biologistic" thesis attracted fierce opponents during the period between the two wars, especially in Catholic circles. Arnold Toynbee reserved harsh words for it, in arguments too readily ignored today.

Toynbee emphasized the difference between technological-material progress and true progress, which he defined as spiritualization.

He recognized that the Western world was indeed undergoing a crisis, which he attributed to the abandonment of religion for the cult of technology, nationalism and militarism. For him this crisis had a name — secularism.

If you know the cause of an illness, you can also find a cure. The religious heritage in all its forms had to be reintroduced, especially the "heritage of Western Christianity."

Rather than a biologistic vision, he offers a voluntaristic one focused on the energy of creative minorities and exceptional individuals.

The Spengler-Toynbee debate remains open because we cannot see into the future. Nevertheless, it is our duty to ask which factors will guarantee the future and which have allowed the inner identity of Europe to survive throughout its metamorphoses in history.

To put it more simply, what can still promise, today and tomorrow, to offer human dignity to life?

Since the 19th century, two new European models have attempted to answer this question. In Europe's Latin nations, the secular model has prevailed.

In this model, a sharp distinction is made between the state and the religious bodies, deeming the latter to fall under the private sphere. The state denies that it has a religious foundation and affirms that it is based on reason and rational knowledge.

Left untreated, the decline of absolute values could lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience — which we must begin to consider as a real danger.

Since reason is inherently fragile, however, these secular systems have proved to be weak, becoming easy targets for dictatorships.

They survive only because elements of the old moral conscience have persevered, even without the earlier foundations, enabling the existence of a basic moral consensus.

In the Germanic world, the liberal Protestant model of church and state has prevailed. An enlightened and essentially moral Christian religion has some forms of worship that are supported by the state.

This relationship guarantees a moral consensus and a broad religious foundation to which individual non-state religions must adapt.

This model has long guaranteed state and social cohesion in Great Britain, the Scandinavian states — and once upon a time also in Prussian-dominated Germany.

In Germany, however, the collapse of Prussian State Christianity left a vacuum that would later provide fertile soil for a dictatorship. Today, state churches throughout the world are characterized by their fatigue.

Moral force — the foundation on which to build — does not emanate from either the religious bodies subservient to the state nor from the state itself.

Situated between the two models is the one adopted by the United States of America. Built on the foundations created by the free churches, it adopts a rigid dogma of separation between church and state.

Above and beyond the single denominations, it is characterized by a Protestant Christian consensus that is not defined in denominational terms — but rather in association with the country's sense of a special religious mission toward the rest of the world.

Moral force does not emanate from either the religious bodies subservient to the state nor from the state itself.

The religious sphere thus acquires a significant weight in public affairs and emerges as a pre-political and supra-political force with the potential to have a decisive impact on political life.

Of course, one cannot hide the fact that in the United States, also, the Christian heritage is falling apart at an incessant pace, while at the same time the rapid increase in the Hispanic population and the presence of religious traditions from all over the world have altered the picture.

The United States is involved to a large extent in promoting Protestantism in Latin America — and hence in the break-up of the Catholic Church — through the work of free church formations.

It does so out of the conviction that the Catholic Church is incapable of guaranteeing a stable political and economic system, since it is considered an unreliable educator of nations.

The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized — so much so that former communists have unhesitatingly become economic liberals — the moral and religious question that it used to address has been almost totally repressed.

The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on — the crumbling of man's original uncertain ties about God, himself and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem today.

Left untreated, it could lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger — above and beyond the decline predicted by Spengler.