ATHENS — Pope Francis, 87 and single, is deploying sex as a weapon against the self-styled arbiters of a reimagined social order based at Brussels. During his annual foreign policy address this week the Pope called  for a universal ban on surrogate motherhood, a practice he decried as  “despicable.” That puts the Vatican in alignment — unwittingly or not — with Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, as well as prevailing sentiment in other prominent European countries such as Greece.

Beyond the immediate implications of Pope Francis’s decidedly outspoken stance on a hot-button subject, his remarks will fuel a long-simmering north-south divide in Europe that pits more traditional societies like Italy and Greece  against the more socially liberal northern ones and throws a new monkey wrench into the already fragile socio-political cohesion of the EU bloc. 

For many who oppose the statist drift and rigid progressive tilt of the European project,  that is not a bad thing at all.  For everyone in the bloc, though, it raises the stakes of upcoming elections for the European Parliament that much higher. 

Pope Francis, for his part, is mostly concerned about the ethics of childbirth when it is not the result of sexual union between a man and woman. In normal times, that would hardly be fodder for  debate, but in an era when even teenagers can be subject to gender reassignment surgery, conversations about the merits of surrogacy or lack thereof seem almost quaint. 

“I consider despicable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood,” Francis said, adding that it “represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.” Eliminating any doubt as to where he stands on the issue, he added that a child should never be “the basis of a commercial contract.”

Surrogacy is a common practice in America and is permitted in a range of European countries, including Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Ukraine, and Russia — but not in Italy, where, like the Pope, Signora Meloni has lambasted the practice of surrogacy as “uterus for rent.”

In May, the Italian premier said that “birth is not for sale, the womb is not for rent, and children are not over-the-counter products that you can choose and then perhaps return.” Putting some bite into her bark, Signora Meloni is pushing for the criminalization of Italians who shop for surrogate mothers abroad. 

That has thrown many same-sex Italian couples into a panic. It also exposes a seeming contradiction from the Vatican, because just last month Pope France said that priests could bless homosexual couples. However, that was not the same thing as endorsing what might be termed as the homosexual lifestyle, which, for male couples, by default cannot involve procreation without artificial interventions like surrogate parenthood. 

This renewed battle in the culture wars is already resonating beyond Rome. Athens is now jumping into this fray too. Resisting calls from the left to legalize surrogacy, Prime Minister Mitsotakis said on Monday that Greece “will not become an experimental laboratory” and that “we will listen to the opinions, we will respect the opposing opinion, but it is the state that legislates.” 

In tabling a new bill on same-sex marriage — another divisive issue in a country where the Greek Orthodox church holds enormous sway — Mr. Mitsotakis said that same-sex male couples will not be allowed to have a child through a surrogate mother, but only through the process of adoption.

What this adds up to is something of a wrecking ball with the EU’s name all over it, written mainly, but not only, by protagonists from the south. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has long opposed the liberal social agenda that dominates Brussels. Its advocates tend to brook no dissent, which sharpens the perception that the EU prefers to govern by diktat instead of democratic debate

This fight will only become more fractious. Last month a majority of members in the European Parliament backed a new law that would establish a “European Parenthood Certificate” and enforce liberal surrogacy and gay adoption laws throughout the EU. 

Catholic groups in Europe have already criticized the draft legislation as an assault on traditional families. Conservative politicians across Europe, but notably Marine Le Pen in France and Signora Meloni’s colleague, Matteo Salvini, in Italy, are already busy preparing for the European Parliament elections in June. Their goal? To send liberal parliamentarians packing. If the latter are looking to  plan a holiday, chances are good it won’t be a Roman one.