Nothing less than the character of Roman Catholicism is at stake. Karol Wojtyla was on the throne of St. Peter for so long that much of the world’s population has come to view his church as irrevocably reactionary on a range of issues, from birth control to the validity of other faiths and its own lack of internal democracy. It has been forgotten there is another, more tolerant, less dogmatic tradition that is still very much alive.

The Catholics who belong to this tradition have long feared that on the death of the Polish pope, his conservative followers would try to endow John Paul II with a status that would prevent any return to the past. The words of Cardinal Sodano, who forged close links between the Vatican and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, made real those fears.

John Wilkins, a former editor of the Catholic weekly Tablet, said Sunday: “It’s part of a rush to attempt to commit the pope’s successor to what policies he should follow and an attempt to push the cardinals in their conclave in a certain direction.”

As the cardinal’s homily showed, this is a twin-track operation. One could lead to aggrandizement. The last pontiff to be styled “Great” reigned more than 1,000 years ago. Nicholas I (858-867) was besieged and almost starved to death rather than agree that a king could swap his wife for a mistress.

The second track is what might be termed preemptive hagiography: treating the pope as if he had already been made a saint. Again, the words of Cardinal Sodano are worth deconstructing. A saint is believed to go straight to heaven. The cardinal ended his service saying: “Let the angels carry him to paradise.”

Catholic religious commentator Clifford Longley said: “There will undoubtedly be pressure to canonize, and maybe there is an argument in favor of getting that out of way, so that the church can move on. He personally was probably a saint: He was certainly extremely devout.”

The reverence being accorded John Paul II creates difficulties for his critics because, for all his theological conservatism, he was a brave voice for peace, most notably and recently in Iraq, and, more in word than in deed, an opponent of unrestrained capitalism.

Even so, conservatives in the Catholic hierarchy and in groups such as Opus Dei have plenty to worry about. The church is known for its swings, summed up in the adage that “a fat pope follows a thin one.” Doubts have been expressed as to whether a College of Cardinals almost entirely chosen by John Paul II could possibly elect anyone who did not share his views. Certainly, an outright progressive is unlikely, but the college includes plenty of moderate, liberal men such as the Belgian Godfried Danneels, who is among the front-runners.

What’s more, the debate over progressiveness and reaction could entail another debate: over whether the conclave turns to the developing world for its next leader. The politics of the conclave will also be about the rich North and poor South.

The Roman Catholic Church has become an anomaly — an organization with a predominantly developing-world membership but a largely first-world leadership. Fewer than 35 percent of baptized Catholics live in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan and Australasia. Some of the African and Asian churches are regarded as immature, but powerful figures such as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s chief theologian, have openly backed the idea of electing a black pope. Then there is the prospect of a tanned one. Latin America, home to more than 40 percent of baptized Catholics, is widely regarded as an even more attractive option and has the largest geographic bloc of cardinals after the Europeans.

Electing a pope from the poorer South would not guarantee a progressive. Most churches in the developing world are conservative on the issues that concern progressive intellectuals in the North. One of Opus Dei’s best hopes is the primate of Peru, Juan Luís Cipriani. One of the most dynamic candidates is Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa in Honduras, who is renowned for his anti-capitalist fervor.

But the developing world is not where most of the church’s problems are, though there is a lively debate over how far the Vatican should go in accepting local cultural and spiritual traditions in Africa and Asia, and Latin Americans are increasingly turning their backs on the church’s teaching on birth control. Many are being drawn toward evangelical Protestantism.

But the biggest headaches for the next pontiff are likely to be posed by his rebellious flocks in western Europe and North America. It is by no means impossible that the College of Cardinals could opt for an Italian. But that might give a disastrous impression to the Catholic church at large — an impression that the men who run it can find no better solution to its problems than to try to turn back the clock.

Sunday, in an indication of the febrile atmosphere surrounding the election, a spokesman for one candidate, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina, denounced claims by a lawyer in Buenos Aires that he had been involved in a plot to kidnap two Jesuit priests during the military dictatorship in the 1970s. “This is old slander. This is the week of slander,” the spokesman told the Associated Press.

Preliminary indications are that the more conservative of the cardinals choosing the next spiritual leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics this week will initially at least rally behind Cardinal Ratzinger, 78, dean of the College of Cardinals, while the more progressive cardinals struggle to find a credible candidate to put up against him. But while Cardinal Ratzinger may be some bookies’ favorite, he may be unable to command the two-thirds plus-one majority — 78 votes — needed to secure the papacy. This could leave the field open for a compromise to emerge, possibly from among the Latin American or European cardinals.

Among the front-runners are the Brazilian archbishops Claudio Hummes and Geraldo Majella Agnelo, though a new dark horse in the shape of Cardinal Javier Francisco Errazuriz of Santiago, Chile, was also being spoken about last week.

If one of the next pope’s problems will be to reinvigorate European and North American Catholics’ support for the faith, Cardinal Ratzinger’s election would be unlikely to stir wild enthusiasm; a recent poll for Der Spiegel magazine showed that even in Germany his opponents outnumber supporters 36 percent to 29 percent. Cardinal Ratzinger has alienated some undecided cardinals by insisting on absolute secrecy in the run-up to the conclave, at a time when many were hoping for greater transparency. He has intervened on no fewer than five occasions in a largely unsuccessful effort to prevent details of deliberations reaching the outside world.

Paradoxically, the reformers have so far rallied around a cardinal they know cannot become pope: Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the Jesuit former archbishop of Milan, Italy, also 78, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. The reformers also hope to see the emergence of either Dionigi Tettamanzi, Martini’s successor in Milan, or Jose da Cruz Policarpo, the patriarch of Lisbon, Portugal.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Ratzinger has been ordered to appear in a court in Texas over a sex abuse scandal. He was named in a suit brought on behalf of three men now in their 20s who claim they were sexually abused as children. The cardinal is accused of obstruction of justice in relation to a Vatican document that emerged in 2003 instructing Catholic bishops to deal with cases of sexual abuse “in the most secretive way.”

Inside, leaflets were scattered from the gallery into the auditorium at the start of the first act by Italy’s ballet dancers. They were protesting next year’s budget, which includes a clause unintentionally forcing them to carry on dancing until they are 65. Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, who arrived with his wife and daughter, judged it wise to slip in by a side door, but was still heckled by several dozen demonstrators.

Socially, the occasion was not quite as illustrious as the theater authorities had hoped. They had invited the queen of England and Presidents Bush and Chirac. Instead they got King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway and the president of Switzerland. Berlusconi sat in the royal box surrounded by the prime ministers of Croatia, Bulgaria and Albania.

Leading figures from the world of arts and fashion were also surprisingly thin on the ground. But Umberto Eco was there, and so were Sophia Loren and Giorgio Armani. “The new La Scala is bellissima. It’s all red, the color I like most,” Loren said. For the gala performance La Scala’s musical director, Riccardo Muti, chose the same work that inaugurated the theater’s opening night in 1778: Antonio Salieri’s “Europa Riconosciuta.”

A sold-out audience gave 12 minutes of applause and 15 curtain calls, although some were not fully won over by the work. “You must be an expert to fully appreciate it … I like [Verdi's] ‘La Traviata,’” said Armani. “I enjoyed the singing parts and music,” the Associated Press quoted Berlusconi as saying.

The area around the theater, in central Milan, was closed to traffic, and more than 1,000 riot police stood guard against possible disturbances from anti-fur protesters and others. Tuesday night’s performance ended three years of exile in premises on the outskirts of the city. During those years, the theater’s outdated equipment and restricted storage facilities have been replaced and a fly tower added so that more elaborate sets can be moved to and from the stage. The decorations in the auditorium were restored and, in many places, replaced, so that last night the theater radiated carmine and shone gold.

The performance was beamed to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan’s venerable shopping arcade, and even into the San Vittore prison. Sopranos Diana Damrau and Desiree Rancatore sang the lead roles, inspired by Greek mythology.

Michael Mertes, a speechwriter for Helmut Kohl when he was chancellor of Germany, and a former editor of the liberal Catholic Rhineland newspaper Rheinischer Merkur, says: “Given the different national traditions in the E.U., rigid secularism has become a lowest common denominator.”

The new commission led by Jose Manuel Barroso stumbled when the liberals and secularists dominating the parliament took exception to the arguably reactionary views on women and gay people of Italian nominee Rocco Buttiglione.

From Spain to Poland a new secularist ascendancy is sweeping all before it. In Spain, José Luis Zapatero’s Socialist government is seeking to roll back the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. France, Europe’s secular citadel, has banned Muslim head scarves in state schools.

In the Netherlands, a new breed of populist and militant secularists has emerged, personified by the assassinated Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, paradoxically dedicated to defending secularism and tolerance through increasingly intolerant views and policies, particularly on Islam and immigration.

In deeply Catholic Poland, there is widespread fear that E.U. membership will bring godless bureaucrats from Brussels, Belgium, bent on denying the Poles the most restrictive abortion laws in the E.U. And in Austria, where more than 90 percent are nominally Catholic but where fewer than 12 percent regularly attend Mass, the Christian right seems to have lost a constitutional fight for God. The government party, the Christian Democrats, wanted a preamble stressing the centrality of Christianity. It has been scaled down to a reference to “the Creation,” and the Social Democrats and Greens want it scrapped altogether. But if the secularists are winning all the battles, many experts fear they may yet lose the war, not least because of the growing influence in the E.U. of the new east European states, inoculated by Communism against too much church-bashing.

Even the Czech Republic, which can lay claim to being the least religious country in Europe, wanted God in the E.U. Constitution. And the admission of 10 countries in May pushed the Catholic population, nominally at least, to almost 60 percent. “For Poland,” says Aleksander Smolar, head of a Warsaw think tank, “this extreme secularism dominating life in the E.U. is completely indefensible”.

At a meeting of European intellectuals in Vienna, Jozsef Szajer, deputy head of the main Hungarian opposition party, reacted bitterly to the Buttiglione humiliation. “Why is it that a Catholic man can’t become an E.U. commissioner, while a former Communist can?” he asked. Edward Best, at the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht, in the Netherlands, is all in favor of keeping God out of politics, debate and constitutions. But he fears a mobilization of the religious right in response to the domination of liberal political correctness. “We’re probably going to get a bit of a backlash. I’m worried about the Poles and the Italians.”

New York sociologist Jose Casanova is even gloomier. Writing about the culture clash in Europe, he warned of a new “intolerant tyranny” of the secular majority, which assumes that its views are “progressive, liberal, and modern” while its opponents are “reactionary, fundamentalist, and anti-modern.”

Joseph Ratzinger, the German cardinal who is one of the most powerful men in the Vatican and an aide to the pope, seems to see the Buttiglione affair as the thin end of the wedge. He complained that secularism is “starting to turn into an ideology that imposes itself by way of politics and does not leave space in public life for a Catholic and Christian vision.”

“A struggle does exist,” he told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica last month. “It seems almost indecent to talk about God in private life, as if it were an attack on the freedom of those who do not believe.”

Other leading Catholic clergy and lay people are embittered by what they term the new “left-wing clericalism” dominating the E.U. “This is a Kulturkampf [conflict of cultures] dressed up as liberalism and tolerance,” Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, archbishop of Munich, Germany, said of the Buttiglione debacle. “Today it would not be possible for the Christian founding fathers of a united Europe, Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman and Alcide de Gasperi, to become E.U. commissioners.”

Buttiglione, chastened by his roasting by MEPs, is promising to begin a European project or movement, probably backed by the Vatican: a vehicle for Christian values still shrouded in uncertainty whose adherents have instantly been dubbed the “theo-cons.” “Lots of people are calling me, from Italy and also from Spain, Britain and Germany, asking me not to let these issues drop, but to carry them forward with political and cultural initiatives. I too am convinced of the need,” he told the Corriere della Sera.

Smolar thinks the war of ideas will get nastier. “Europe is the only utterly secularized continent on Earth. It’s the exception.”