EU Bishops’ Commission Holds Service to Commemorate EU Founding Father Robert Schuman

Brussels, September 3, 2023 (KAP/KNA) The Catholic EU Bishops’ Commission COMECE commemorates the politician Robert Schuman (1886-1963) with a service. The Mass will take place on Monday evening at the Chapel for Europe in Brussels’ European Quarter. September 4th is the 60th anniversary of the death of Schuman, considered one of the founding fathers of the EU. With the idea of ​​a mining union between Germany and France presented in 1950, the native of Luxembourg laid the foundation for Franco-German reconciliation and European unification. The beatification process for the convinced Catholic has been going on for a long time and is already well advanced.

Schuman was the first President of the European Parliament and later received the honorary title “Father of Europe”. In many ways he was seen as a European border crosser: his homeland was also on the border between Luxembourg and Lorraine – which fell to the German Reich in 1871. During World War I he served as a reservist in the German army. After the separation of Alsace-Lorraine, he worked as a lawyer in Metz and became a member of the Paris National Assembly in 1919.

After the early death of his parents, Schuman actually wanted to become a priest. But friends convinced him that the world needed competent lay people; “Saints in Street Suits”. So the multi-talented embarked on a career as a lawyer and lay Catholic.

As early as the 1920s, Schuman established a dense network of contacts with Christian democratic politicians from all over Europe, such as Konrad Adenauer and the Italian Alcide de Gasperi. These relations bore fruit after 1945. But first, as Undersecretary of State for Refugees, Schuman came into conflict with Petain’s Vichy government; in autumn 1940 he was the first prominent French politician to be arrested. After escaping from Gestapo custody in August 1942, Schuman hid with the Benedictines. He was now working in the resistance; In 1945 he founded the Christian Democratic Party.

Between 1947 and 1953, Schuman was a member of all the rapidly changing French governments – first as finance minister, then as prime minister and foreign minister. Against the hostility of the Gaullists, he pursued his idea of ​​European unification and a Franco-German rapprochement with energy. The Strasbourg Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950 is also considered to be his work.

In May 1950 the so-called Schuman Plan was presented. The foreign minister at the time envisaged a “mining union” between France and Germany, i.e. official supervision of the steel and coal production of both countries. The joint management of the central materials of the armaments industry by the former hereditary enemies was an active peace policy for Schuman.

This instrument, which was also open to other countries to join, was to become the nucleus of European unification – which today extends far beyond what was once the Iron Curtain. The city of Aachen awarded Schuman the Charlemagne Prize in 1958. Even more far-reaching elements of integration, such as a European Defense Community, failed at the time due to national resistance.

“Christian visionary and political realist”

In an interview with the German Catholic news agency KNA, the historian Matthias Waechter, director of the Center international de formation europeenne CIFE in Nice, praised Schuman as a Christian visionary who at the same time remained a “political realist”, “who, in a time of mutual mistrust, quite consciously did not proposed a pathos-laden refoundation of Europe on Christian-democratic foundations”. Rather, he was concerned with “overcoming the centuries-old antagonism between France and Germany with a new method”.

Schuman and his advisors were clearly right in their method of not creating Europe all at once; instead, it should “constantly evolve in justifiable, rational, and necessary steps.” Coupled with a limited relinquishment of sovereignty, this method is still the recipe for success today.

With regard to the role of a Catholic in French politics, Waechter emphasizes that Schuman tried to protect his region from the installation of French laicism. The present-day departments of Moselle, Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin initially belonged to the German Empire from 1871. And when Alsace and Lorraine came back to France after 1918, the question arose whether the separation of church and state would be introduced there, as had been the case in the rest of France since 1905. According to Waechter, Schuman was one of those who prevented this. To this day, these departments have a special status: there is religious instruction in the schools, and the priests receive a salary from the state.

After retiring as Speaker of Parliament in 1960, the bachelor Schuman suffered a heart attack on an evening walk in the winter of 1961. He lay in the cold all night and never fully recovered. He died on September 4, 1963 at the age of 77 in his country house in Scy-Chazelle near Metz. In front of the EU Parliament in 1988, Pope John Paul II called Schuman an “eternal role model for all those responsible for building Europe”.