Let us consider the condition of European religion at the end of the first millennium. The most likely scenarios for the future at that time would have been that Europe would become Muslim or Nordic or Slavic pagan. The Danes (Norse, Varangians, Vikings) were attacking Britain, Ireland, Northern France, the Mediterranean countries, and what we now call the Ukraine. The Arabs had swept away the Christian countries of the Middle East and Northern Africa and occupied most of Spain (where they had built a civilization which was matched nowhere in Western Europe).

The Saracens (as Christians called them) had occupied Sicily and periodically sacked Rome. The Papacy was dominated by the women of the Theophylact family and was in its worst condition ever. The "Franks" had not been able to hold together the empire of Charlemagne and were having a difficult time imposing Catholicism on the Wends, the Lithuanians and the North Slavs. Byzantine Orthodoxy had enjoyed some progress among the South Slavs but had to contend with the pagan Bulgarians. No one would have bet on the survival of Christianity, save perhaps in far-off Ireland where the Danes were becoming Christian - and perhaps in scattered Irish monasteries on the continent. (Somehow they had managed to arrive in Moravia before Cyril and Methodius and in Kiev before Vladimir).

Thus the sociologist who dares to make projections about the Christian future in Europe treads cautiously. He would much rather project the present trends into the immediate future, save five or 10 years. He garners a little more courage from the fact that the present trends seem rather firmly rooted in the past. Thus the end of organised religion, so cheerfully predicted by the wise men of the Enlightenment, seems so long overdue after a couple of centuries that there is no point in waiting for it.

In a recent study of 23 European nations conducted by the International Social Survey Programme, the majority of every nation except the Czech Republic and the former East Germany believed in God. In five of the countries - Cyprus, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland and Portugal more than nine out of 10 believe in God. In Italy, Spain, and Austria more than eight out of 10 believe in God, and in Switzerland, Slovakia and Latvia seven out of 10 are believers. (In Britain, the rate is 69 per cent). On the other hand, except in east Germany (51 per cent), atheists represent no more than a fifth of the population in any European nation. In 12 nations less than a tenth are atheists. In Russia, now in the midst of what may be the largest religious revival in human history, a third of the people say that once they didn't believe in God, but they now do.

In half of the nations the majority believes in religious miracles. Even in east Germany, where only 25 per cent believe in God, 39 per cent believe in religious miracles. If there is no God the question arises as to who works the religious miracles. Or perhaps the right question is, who is the God in whom the east Germans do not believe? (In Ireland 72 per cent believe in miracles, in Britain 42 per cent). The picture which emerges out of these data is that God is alive and well in Europe, more alive in some countries than in others perhaps and the subject of serious devotion in only a few, but nonetheless still alive long after the Enlightenment is dead and buried - and cremated in the two Great Wars.

In 17 of the countries, most people also believe in life after death. Moreover - and this is the most striking finding I will report in my book Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium - in 17 of the 23 countries the youngest birth cohorts (born since 1960) are more likely to believe in life after death that the earlier cohorts. In most cases a U-curve fits the data: the oldest and youngest cohorts are more likely to believe in life after death than the middle two cohorts. Grandparents and grandchildren are more likely to believe in human survival than parents.

In six of the other countries (like Ireland, Poland and Cyprus) the level of belief is so high that there seems to be a ceiling on increase. Only in Britain is there a decrease in belief in life after death among the youngest cohort.

As I look at the U-curves I wonder if they do not reflect the impact of the second World War - the lowest levels of hope in human survival are among the cohorts born during and immediately after the end of the war. More recently there is a return to what might be a relatively constant demand for hope, somewhere between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of the population, anticipating human survival.

Magic survives in Europe too, save in those countries like Ireland and east Germany where there is relative certainty about the existence or the non-existence of God. In countries like the former West Germany where there is relative uncertainty about God there is a much higher rate of belief in good luck charms, faith healers, astrology, and fortune tellers. Moreover in the latter countries, magic tends to blend with orthodox belief while in east German and Ireland there is little such mixing.

In none of the countries except east Germany do any less than a majority claim religious affiliation - though admittedly in some countries like Scandinavia this may be more of a civic than a religious affiliation. There are only four countries in which religious affiliation has significantly declined in the last decade, Ireland, England, Slovenia and Hungary (though only by four percentage points in Ireland).

In the three Catholic countries this decline can be accounted for by an increase during the decade of dissatisfaction with the behaviour of Church leadership. In England it may be that the appeal of Anglicanism is in a period of historic decline. The drop in confidence in church leadership occurs in almost all of the nations studied, even in Russia where there has been a tremendous increase in church affiliation. In virtually all the countries (including Poland, Italy, and Ireland) the traditional sexual and reproductive ethic is rejected by substantial to overwhelming majorities.

Thus in Europe at the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third (January 1, 2001), belief in God is stable, belief in life after death is increasing among the young, magic persists as does church affiliation, confidence in church leaders declines and the traditional sexual teaching can no longer be enforced. The continent is by no means devout (if it ever were, which seems unlikely) but religion survives.

When I tell them that I'm working on a book about religion in Europe at the end of the millennium, many of my colleagues are surprised. Isn't religion completely dead in Europe? It is fair to say, I think, that this is an assumption, almost a dogma in the universities of Europe and America (though there is surprisingly little correlation between university attendance and religious decline).

I cite the Russian religious revival and say that God is alive and well and has been hiding in the Moscow Metro. However, the lesser religious revivals in the other former socialist countries (including an increase in belief in life after death even among the young in east Germany) and the persistence of religion in other countries, especially the Catholic countries, also call into question the dogma of the death of religion.

It will come eventually, say the surviving believers in the doctrines of the Enlightenment from Voltaire to Durkheim. When, I ask. In face of the data they rarely are willing to guess. Voltaire, I observe, died a quarter of a millennium ago and religion still slogs along, however imperfectly and however much below its own ideals.

Why? The reason I think is that humans tend (maybe two thirds of them) to need something to believe in and something to belong to, some kind of meaning and some sort of belonging, something to explain both life and death and a heritage to pass on to their children.

Hence my very cautious projections for the third millennium in Europe:

1) Religion will survive. Human kind will continue to believe, perhaps hesitantly and not without doubt, in God.

2) Belief in life after death will survive. Faced with an alternative between Macbeth's "tale told by an idiot" and Teilhard's de Chardin's "something is afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth," humankind will continue to tilt however uncertainly towards the latter option.

3) Magic will also survive, because humans want certainty which is more than just hope.

4) The main religious heritages - Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Islamic - will also survive and perhaps, only perhaps, come closer together. Catholicism may have the greatest resources of imagination and story, but there is no reason at present to believe that those resources mean much to the clergy and the hierarchy, not as much as the power they do not want to give up.

5) The churches will no longer be able to control the private behaviour of their members. People will decide their own terms for affiliation.

6) Eventually - heaven knows when - religious leaders will learn that it is no longer enough to give orders. They must also learn to listen.

7) There will also be - again no predictions - a turn away from the authoritarian centralism in church governance in the past centuries and a return to the more democratic and pluralistic styles of governance of the first millennium.

8) Theologians and church leaders and especially theologians who are church leaders may learn that it is not enough to describe a problem theologically to solve it, but don't bet too much on that.

These are very modest projections based either on the data or on the obvious implications of the data. They suggest that the present situation, in which people cling to faith by their finger tips with little help from clergy or theologians, however unstable it might be, could also constitute the "normal" condition for religion in our era and the eras immediately to come.

After that, I leave predictions to the visionaries, to the seers and to those who hear whispers in the night. I have said nothing about the social and environmental and global issues with such many of the religious elite are concerned. I have simply no data to estimate the extent to which these concerns are likely to permeate the religious population in the years ahead. None of the four religions of the book have figured out yet what will replace the missionary impulse of the last several centuries or even if it should be replaced.

There is, I realised something depressingly dull and unexciting about my projections. They are gray, problematic, and sound like too much of more of the same thing. Such, I submit, is the nature of reality, especially the short-run reality with which we sociologists must deal.

Yet there will also surely appear in the third millennium marvels which no one anticipates as well as tragedies which no one fears.otre Dame du de Paris and the Sorbonne. When Boru and his forces defeated the Danes at Clontarf (among which Danes there were more Irish Catholics than in Boru's army), no one could anticipate that the Danes would soon become as Irish and as Catholic as anyone else. When Rurik and his band of Norse settled at Kiev, one could not have expected the enormous flourishing of Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe. When the Theopylacts ran the papacy, no one could have predicted Pope John XXIII. Nor could one No one could have anticipated that at the height of its cultural success, Christendom would tear itself apart in the Reformation.

God keeps his surprises to Himself.

Father Andrew Greeley is a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago and teaches at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona. He is the author with Father Conor Ward of the report "How Secularized is the Ireland We Live in" published in the December issue of Doctrine and Life magazine)