Source : Perth Now news
Pope Leo XIV urged Europe on Monday to draw from its Christian roots and traditions of dialogue to blunt the “desire for domination” driving today’s wars, as he wraps up a visit to France by recalling the forces that contributed to Europe’s post-World War II peaceful integration.
Leo travelled to the eastern city of Metz, near the border with Luxembourg and Germany, to honour Robert Schuman, a French Catholic statesman regarded as one of the founding fathers of European unity.
Leo decided to end his four-day visit to France in Metz, at a conference centre named for Schuman, to drive home his appeal.
He wants Europe to draw from its Christian foundations and traditions to respond Russia’s war in Ukraine and other conflicts.
He said international law and multilateralism “constitute the best antidote to the desire for domination, which lies at the root of every conflict. Today, relations between individuals and states are becoming increasingly uncivilised.”
The Elysee Palace had invited all European Union heads of state and the heads of European institutions to attend the conference, but only a handful joined President Emmanuel Macron, from smaller states such as Monaco, Andorra and Luxembourg.
Leo’s visit to the once staunchly Catholic and officially secular France has been marked by his appeal for Europe to remember its Christian heritage and apply it to today’s ethical and geopolitical challenges.
On Sunday at the Catholic shrine in Lourdes, he condemned legislation – recently approved in France – permitting medically assisted dying as “false compassion”.
Huge crowds have met him at nearly every turn – 800,000 were at Leo’s mass on Paris’s iconic Place de la Concorde – surprising even organisers.
Later on Monday in his final event in France, Leo was to celebrate mass in the cathedral of St Stephen in Metz.
The cathedral is one of the greatest examples of French Gothic style, with its soaring vaults and stained-glass windows, some of which were designed by the 20th century Jewish artist Marc Chagall.
The coloured glass has given the cathedral the nickname the Lanterne du Bon Dieu, or “The Good Lord’s Lantern”.
Schuman is best known for the Schuman Declaration of 1950, five years after the war ended.
It proposed the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community to pool production between historical rivals France and Germany.
The idea, as Europe was emerging from the ruins of World War II, was guided by the belief that intertwined economic interests would make another war between them “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible”.
The coal and steel organisation was the first among European institutions that were precursors to what eventually became the European Union.
A resistance fighter imprisoned by the Nazis, Schuman was declared “venerable” in 2021, a step in the Catholic Church’s process towards possible sainthood.
