Headlines the world over yesterday announced the new pope, Leo XIV.
Headlines exactly 75 years ago today, May 10, 1950, announced a new audacious plan for peace: ‘France takes the nations by surprise’. ‘Sensational decision’. ‘Schuman bomb’.
It was a plan inspired by the teachings of Pope Leo XIII.
Announced at a press conference at 6pm the evening before by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, this plan has shaped the lives of all Europeans, inside and outside of the European Union.
Read on one level, it was a bold but simple plan to bind former enemies – particularly France and Germany – so closely together economically that war would become ‘not merely unthinkable but materially impossible’.
It proposed pooling coal and steel production – critical industries for military power – under a shared, supranational authority, bringing the nations together in interdependence, and mutual accountability.
I like to call it the defining moment in post-war European history. For from that day onwards, a plan was on the table for European integration which led directly to today’s European Union.
Although the guns had fallen silent five years earlier, real peace had not yet been established. The Berlin airlift the year before was a prelude to the Cold War to follow. Europe was still suffering a severe case of post-trauma stress disorder. Scattered families, bombed cities, disrupted lives and broken futures seemed insurmountable obstacles to true peace.
Anguished
The statue in Rotterdamof an anguished figure, by the Russian-French sculptor Zadkine, hands thrust in the air revealing a gaping hole in his torso, was an image not only of that city ravaged by Hitler’s blitzkrieg, but also of cities all across Europe and indeed the whole continent itself.
What would it take to heal a city, a nation, a continent from such brokenness? What was it in Schuman’s three-minute speech that started the healing process?
While the plan proposed economic cooperation, Schuman would later warn that the project had to be more than just economic and technological; it needed a soul.
Read on a deeper level, the Schuman Declaration is deeply moral, even spiritual, rooted in values of the heart. Without using religious jargon, Schuman infused the declaration with values indispensable for the rebuilding of post-war Europe. He did not envision Europe as a ‘Christian club’ but insisted that its humanist, democratic culture was impossible without its Christian roots.
Firstly, the declaration embodied a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation. Never before in history had a victor the fallen foe as an equal, as did France to western Germany with this announcement.
We can go through the Declaration and highlight those words reflecting such values, beginning with peace, coming together, participation, pooling, common, solidarity, unification, equal, commmunity…
The core values of the Schuman Declaration were:
- Peace through cooperation, not domination.
- Solidarity among nations, rather than competition.
- Supranational governance as a new form of international order, limiting aggressive nationalism.
- Democracy and rule of law as cornerstones for building trust between states.
These values are summed up in the Great Commandment to love God and neighbour.
Two sources
Real peace, Schuman believed, was not the absence of war, but the active construction of relationships founded onjustice and solidarity. After two world wars, the task of rebuilding Europe required not only new institutions, but a moral renewal, a reawakening of conscience, a rediscovery of human brotherhood.
European unity must be rooted in ‘freedom, equality and solidarity’, which we have drawn from Christian teachings, he later wrote in his book For Europe. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité– the French national motto – were not inventions of the Enlightenment, as Schuman indicated, but grew out of a deeper spiritual reality.
Schuman’s personal spirituality had two sources.
From his youth he was schooled in the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, as first articulated by Leo XIII in 1891 – as were his two colleagues Konrad Adenauer and Alcide de Gasperi.
Building on the concept of imago Dei, that every person was created in the Creator’s image, the Catholic Church championed the solidarity of the human race and thus the concept of seeking the common good of all – not just seeking to make our own nation great.
A second source of Schuman’s spirituality was the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement led by the Lutheran evangelist, Frank Buchman. This stressed the centrality of forgiveness and reconciliation for true peace, and that a changed world began with personal change in each one of us.
Yesterday, we commemorated Europe Day in Warsaw, currently the capital of the country holding the EU presidency. The State of Europe Forum continues today as we explore Christian responses to challenges facing us in Europe today.
The choice of the name Leo XIV seems to indicate the new pope’s intention to focus on the values of peace, solidarity, seeking the common good, equality, mutual accountability and collaboration.
And that’s good news in these days of uncertainty and turbulence.
Till next week,
