  Recent work in Euclidean quantum gravity has studied boundary conditions
which are completely invariant under infinitesimal diffeomorphisms on metric
perturbations. On using the de Donder gauge-averaging functional, this scheme
leads to both normal and tangential derivatives in the boundary conditions. In
the present paper, it is proved that the corresponding boundary value problem
fails to be strongly elliptic. The result raises deep interpretative issues for
Euclidean quantum gravity on manifolds with boundary.
