What is Europe without Christianity? It's like a corpse without a soul. It's like the Holy Land without Judaism, like Saudi Arabia without Islam, or like India without Hinduism.

Has Valery Giscard d'Estaing good reasons for leaving out Christianity in his final draft constitution? "It looks as though the secularists have won," wrote Alan Woodraw in his article 'Europe without God'.

But that is 'bad' secularism! It is a fact that for many French people secularism has been quite a struggle to obtain during the French Revolution, and this has left traces which still stir up passions against the Church.

After the Christian State and the atheist State (its antithesis), the neutral secular State has been quite a step forward, but only insofar as it lets its many social and religious groups enough room to give life to the ramifications of today's complex national structures.

That is 'good' secularism. It seems that modern man even in France has discarded the negative secularist mentality vis-à-vis the Church and has come back to a more positive notion of secularism. Or has he?

It is a historical fact that our European civilisation is profoundly marked by Christianity, both in the West and the East. After Constantine's religious peace in 313 Christian evangelisation spread rapidly through the Roman Empire and slowly altered the culture of numerous European countries by introducing the art of writing like that of St Patrick in Ireland in the fifth century.

Also, medieval universities, such as that of Bologna, the oldest in Europe in the 11th century, followed by those of Oxford and Paris in the 13th century, became a 'community', as the Latin word "universitas" meant at the time.

Students travelled all over Europe to continue their studies in different universities. This situation brought students and lecturers together and gave them a feeling of European belonging.

This tradition is nowadays being emulated by the Erasmus project, so called after Desiderious Erasmus, the most famous scholar of the 16th century, who also studied and lectured in various European universities.

In the Middle Ages Europe became a continent of pilgrimages. When Islam made it impossible for Christians to visit the Holy Land, a vast network of routes intersected Europe towards holy sanctuaries, like that of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, Chartres in France and Czestochowa in Poland.

This complex system of intersecting routes contributed to the intermixing of peoples and cultures to create progressively a Christian identity and a European conscience; a community on the move towards God.

Christian monasticism in both east and west signified a retreat from the world but monks were not drop-outs. After the Germanic migrations of the fifth and sixth centuries and the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, the Church represented the decisive factor of continuity. It was these monks, and not the princes, who could read and write, and developed a new written European culture.

What ancient literature was handed down to the Middle Ages usually came above all through these monasteries. These monks founded schools all over Europe and other kinds of religious congregations, who helped in the education and instruction of the masses, as well as hospices for the sick and destitute, abandoned children and the elderly.

However, the Church's history in Europe was not always made of roses. Some of her abuses are quite blatant, such as: the many forced conversions, the notorious Spanish Inquisition, the witchhunt, the many religious wars, the absolutist centralism of the Curia and its immorality.

The Lutheran Reformation in the 16th century which produced another split in Western Christendom (North and South) was a facsimile of separation in 1054 between the Western Roma Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches.

The secularist's concern for the liberation of the European Union from a recurrent abuse of clericalism is justifiable, but today's Christian phenomenon is no longer a sign of alienation and domination. Christianity can still contribute, as it has done in the past 2000 years, to its future construction of fraternity.