Pope to beatify late French PM Schuman, architect of EU: report

POPE TO BEATIFY LATE FRENCH PM SCHUMAN, ARCHITECT OF EU: REPORT


PARIS, March 1 (AFP) - Pope John Paul II hopes to use a visit to France later this year to beatify Robert Schuman, the late French prime minister widely revered as the architect of Europe's post-war reconciliation, a newspaper reported Monday.
A report on Schuman's candidacy drawn up by the Catholic church in France will be dispatched shortly to Rome, where the Congregation for the Causes of Saints has been told to process it in time for the pope's French trip in September, Le Figaro newspaper said.
The pope communicated his desire in a meeting with three French bishops in the Vatican on Friday, the paper said.
"We are delighted and surprised that the church is pushing the case so hard," said Jacques Paragon, secretary-general of the Saint Benoit Institute which has campaigned for Schuman's beatification since 1988.
"He was a practising and engaged Christian and the argument of the church is that he was a visionary statesman precisely because he was a Christian," Jean-Dominique Giuliani, who heads the Robert Schuman Foundation in Paris, said.
Born in Luxembourg in 1886, Schuman was France's foreign minister when he delivered a seminal address in 1950 calling for an end to nationalism in Europe and the creation of a Franco-German coal and steel community. This was the first step to today's European Union.
Schuman died in 1963, shortly after the signing of the Elysee treaty that sealed the new alliance between France and Germany.
"The extraordinary thing about Schuman is that he went into politics against his personal will. It was the church that convinced him that he had a vocation to serve the common good. And he used faith as the engine for political action," Paragon said.
"He had the wonderful, some would say revolutionary, idea that peace should not be result of a treaty -- with a victor and a vanquished -- but of the realisation of a shared interest. And he wanted Europe to be the model for the world," he said.
Under the Vatican's rules on sainthood, a member of the church can be beatified -- counted among the blessed in heaven -- if study reveals their life to have been heroically virtuous and if at least one miracle can be shown to have taken place thanks to their intercession.
http://www.ttc.org/pa40301a.htm

Schuman was a very good man, but this is a little bizarre.

About 40 years ago, getting France and Germany to actually agree on something could almost be considered a miracle.

By that token they should beatify Bush after he dies. It took a miracle for the American people to persuaded that Osama had anything to do with Iraq.

then there's hope for the US's own Dorothy Day.