The euro was designed to force reluctant European nations to unite politically. A few years ago, that would have been a controversial statement. Now you can find statements like that from most newspapers and economic analysts.

There’s also a lot of consensus on what comes next. The big questions under discussion now are things like, Will the euro fail now, or in another 10 years? In Britain, many euroskeptics are declaring “mission accomplished.” Europe’s big plan to force EU nations to fuse together into a political union—i.e. superstate—has been defeated.

But is the euro really doomed?

It’s true that the EU’s push toward integration has stuck. Germany has a huge amount of power over Greece, Portugal and Cyprus. But that power isn’t being extended quickly over the rest of the eurozone. It’s easy to see why: Across Europe, the different nations hold very firm and starkly contradicting views on what they want for the euro. And from their point of view, each nation seems perfectly justified.

Take the Greeks. They were promised that the euro would be a vehicle to great prosperity. And it was, at first. But now European bureaucrats are dictating how their country is run—and overthrowing governments that refuse to comply with Europe’s wishes. No wonder the Greeks are angry and want to take national power back from Europe.

But Germans—the villains to the Greeks—also seem justified in their view. They joined the euro only after being given a legal guarantee stating that they would never have to bail out another EU nation. But that law was ignored. Over the past decade, Germany has made some important but painful adjustments to its economy and finances. Germany raised its retirement age to 67, while Greece, until recently, had some very generous early retirement provisions. What German chancellor wants to tell her people that they have to send their money to Greece, while Greek hairdressers retire at 50?

There are counterarguments (for example, that the lazy Greek stereotype is a myth) and counter-counterarguments. But the fact remains that these are deep-seated and emotional viewpoints that are stopping Europe from moving toward a superstate. It gets back to one central problem: Germany doesn’t want to share a credit card with the eurozone without having a say in how the money is spent, and other eurozone countries don’t want Germany to tell them how to spend their money.

Which brings us to the current impasse, where both sides fight tooth-and-nail over the tiniest steps toward a superstate. On December 19, for example, the EU agreed on how to deal with troubled banks. And the “solution” was a complete mess.

The idea is sound. Currently, if a major bank goes bust, it could bring the whole country down with it, forcing the nation to get a bailout and endangering the eurozone itself. By creating a common pot of money to deal with this problem, the risk of a financial crisis could be substantially reduced.

But a lot of this money would have to come from Germany. And they don’t want to put it up, unless they get to decide when it is used. That would put Germany in the position of Caesar at a gladiator tournament—a thumbs up or thumbs down from Berlin would determine whether a troubled economy lived or died. No one wanted to give Germany that kind of power.

The resulting compromise was messy—even by European standards. The amount of money put forward is far short of what is necessary. And that money won’t be available for a while, and it is all tied up in a nightmare bureaucracy. “From the moment a bank is identified as being at risk, up to the moment it is closed, the new system might require approvals from as many as 100 people,” said Annalisa Piazza from the brokerage firm Newedge.

This is why so many predict the doom of the euro. For it to survive it needs to get past these obstacles. The crisis has proven that a common currency cannot exist without a common government, just like its founders acknowledged. There is simply a huge amount of opposition to the political union that the founders wanted.

Many of those that predict the end of the euro thought that it would fail a lot sooner. Some freely admit that they underestimated the amount of will behind this project. That will is still there. The common currency will not be allowed to fail, but there are still two more things that have to happen before the euro is finally fixed.

The first is another crisis. Things are simply not yet bad enough for eurozone countries to hand over the power to Germany in return for German help. For that to happen, they need to be even more desperate.

But there are plenty of ways for this to come about. Unemployment is still unbelievably high—around 27 percent in Greece and Spain according to the latest figures. For the youth it’s around 60 percent. That’s a huge drain on these nations’ welfare budgets, but, more importantly, it’s a social crisis waiting to happen.

At the start of the euro crisis, in February 2009, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote, “Social unrest and riots will eventually force Europeans to succumb to a strong united government of Europe, led ultimately not from Brussels, but from Berlin.”

But even before then, Mr. Flurry’s predecessor, Herbert W. Armstrong, wrote in 1984 that a massive banking crisis in America “could suddenly result in triggering European nations to unite as a new world power larger than either the Soviet Union or the U.S.”

We are seeing that prophecy play out already. And it would be quite easy for the fallout from that banking collapse, still being felt in Europe, to create the crisis necessary for the eurozone nations to come together. But, as Trumpet columnist Robert Morley wrote earlier this week, the U.S. economy is heading for another banking crisis. That too could give the eurozone the push it needs to unite.

But even another crisis isn’t enough to complete the process of European integration. After all, many of the protest groups are against the euro and Germany, just as much as they are against their own government. That opposition can be overcome—especially if German money starts fixing the problems they’re protesting about. But it will take some doing.

That extra push will come from the Roman Catholic Church—the second factor Europe is waiting for. Here is an important quote from Herbert W. Armstrong in 1978 that explains precisely all the difficulties European leaders are experiencing today:

Europeans want their own united military power! They know that a political union of Europe would produce a third major world power, as strong as either the United States or the ussr—possibly stronger!They have made a real effort toward union in the Common Market. It has made them economically strong. United they could become stronger economically than the United States. The dollar continues dropping in European and Japanese markets—and especially the German mark has soared stronger and stronger, along with the Swiss franc and Japanese yen.But they well know there is but one possibility of union in Europe—and that is through the Vatican.

European leaders have just returned from a summit where they failed to make the great leap toward a European army that they wanted. Their economy is a mess. They’ve gone about as far as they can go without major Catholic help.

The pope recently made a significant foray into the world of economics, reiterating Catholic social doctrine (see Andrew Miiller’s article on the subject). Is he preparing to get involved in the euro crisis? The Catholic Church is the only group with enough moral authority for both sides of this bitter disagreement to sit up and listen.

Without the glue of the Catholic Church, the euro would fall apart. It is the vital factor ignored by the hopeful euroskeptics.

One important caveat: When we talk about the euro not failing, we mean that there will be some kind of common currency—like the euro. The euro could be destroyed and replaced by an alternative European currency. The Trumpet has long forecast that the European superpower that emerges from the crisis will be made up of 10 nations or groups of nations, which indicates it will be a lot smaller than the current eurozone.

At the start of 2011, Mr. Flurry wrote: “Germany will use this crisis to force Europe to unite more tightly. In the process, some eurozone countries will be forced out of the union. When that happens, the pundits will say European unification is dead, that the European Union has failed. Don’t listen to them!”

We’ve not seen eurozone countries leave yet, but we’ve heard pundits proclaiming the death of European unification. They are wrong.

But the ardent pro-Europeans who proclaim the euro is fixed and the crisis solved are also wrong. The euro will keep causing crises until the countries that use it are united politically as well as monetarily.

A combination of history and Bible prophecy tells us to expect the Catholic Church to play a key role in uniting Europe. To understand what these two tell us about the rise of Europe, read Mr. Flurry’s 2011 article “A Monumental Moment in European History!”