Here is Weigel: "Christianity taught European man his own dignity" and "a proper respect for individuality." It can hardly have been otherwise. Christianity values the individual. The state doesn't. Answer: Restrain the state; make it respect individual dignity. John Paul II's assertion of that truth helped undermine communism. All of a sudden the pope's fellow Poles weren't just cogs in a vast machine. They were images of their creator with dignity and rights. Evil could no longer face them down. They faced it down.

 Weigel knows the church shouldn't run society. What the church can do is help set the moral tone. "Absent a secure and publicly assertive moral culture, the machines of democracy and the free economy cannot run well over the long haul; a moral culture capable of disciplining and directing the tremendous energies set loose by free politics and free economics" is vital to the free society.

 Politics without God? Can't do it. Or anyway those who attempt it, out of pride or indifference, can't do it right, "because God's search for man and the human response to that divine quest is the central reality of history."

 The Constitution of Europe, ratified or left to dry in the sun, is more a symbol than a civilizational question. But that which it symbolizes -- the quest for life without God -- contradicts everything our civilization has taught about means and ends and justice and freedom

 Could it be time for another toast to the intuition of the voters of la France?