Why the sign of Our Lady reigns over Europe
When secularists parade with the European Union flag they are unwittingly honouring the Immaculate Conception. By Angelo Stagnaro

4 December 2009

Belgium is a wonderful country but one can’t always tell that when in Brussels. This city is the least example of how wonderful the country as a whole is. I don’t think even the residents of Brussels want to be there.

I walked across one of the many plazas scattered throughout this, one of the three capitals of the European Union, when I spied a shop festooned completely, in and out, with the European Union flag. The EU symbol is so ubiquitous throughout Europe that one can barely register it consciously.

I’ve always been impressed with the clean layout and design of the European Union’s flag. Its subfusc, cerulean blue is coincidently my favourite colour. It’s the blue present in the sky just as the sun is about to rise. Personally, I’ve always associated that particular shade of blue with the Blessed Mother.

I stepped into the store and nearly mowed down a tiny Belgian lady who was the proprietress. She recognised my accent immediately and asked me what brought me to Belgium. I told her I was on a pilgrimage and her eyes immediately widened.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” she yelled in Walloon-laced English. “I thought no one would bring that up! Did you know the EU symbol is from the Bible?”

As first I thought it was a marketing ploy considering the woman had obviously invested a great deal of money in coffee mugs and mouse pads with the EU symbol plastered over them. “No! No! No! It’s true!” she insisted with stereotypical Belgian ebullience.

“It is a symbol of Virgin Marie!” And then, as if on cue, she reached behind her cash register and grabbed a well-worn copy of a French Bible, quickly thumbed through and held it out for me to read: Un grand signe parut dans le ciel: une femme enveloppée du soleil, la lune sous ses pieds, et une couronne de douze étoiles sur sa tête (“Then a great and mysterious sight appeared in the sky.

There was a woman, whose dress was the sun and who had the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head” – Revelations 12:1.)

“Yes, that’s right!” the excited women continued. “The ring of 12 stars is a symbol of Mary and I love to point it out to those who did not know it.” She said this with an infectious smile which lit up the room.

Arsène Heitz, the flag’s designer, acknowledged in a 2008 interview that he derived the design of a circle of 12 golden stars from the Book of Revelation. As Heitz was considering a design to submit for the EU, he was reading the history of the Blessed Virgin’s apparitions in Paris’ Rue du Bac, known today as the Virgin of the Miraculous Medal. In fact, he belonged to the Order of the Miraculous Medal, which would explain his intimate acquaintanceship with the symbol.

Thus the symbol recognised worldwide as to the European Union and of Europe in general even by atheists, secularists and Muslims, is a symbol of the Immaculate Conception herself. It warms the cockles of an old Catholic’s heart. European atheists running around in the streets waving the European Union flag over their heads have no idea, or choose to ignore, the true meaning behind the EU’s symbol. And, they are apparently stuck with it as the design isn’t going to change as long as the European Union exists.

In celebration of the adoption of the symbol the Council of Europe commissioned and installed a magnificent stained-glass window in Strasbourg Cathedral which depicts the Blessed Virgin Mother standing beneath an oversized circle of 12 stars on deep blue field. In addition, the European flag was adopted by the then European Economic Community on December 8 1955, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Coincidence? I think not.

Heitz never explained to anyone where he got the idea for the EU flag but instead explained that the 12 stars symbolised “perfection and completeness”. For example, there are 12 hours on a clock, 12 months in a year and 12 tables of Roman Law. There are 12 apostles, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 sons of Jacob and 12 minor prophets in the Bible. There are 12 ounces in a troy pound, 12 semitones in an octave and 12 hues in the colour wheel. And lest we forget, 12 days in Christmastide.

But the European Union’s Catholicity is more than merely its flag. Robert Schuman, a former French foreign minister and one of the founders of the European Union, was a devout Catholic and daily communicant who lived a celibate and ascetic life.

Konrad Adenauer, the late German chancellor, dubbed Schuman “a saint in a business suit”. Schuman spearheaded a plan to consolidate the French and West German coal and steel industries under a single authority. This proposal led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the forerunner of what is now the European Union (EU). The event is celebrated annually as Europe Day or Schuman Day (May 9.)

According to Alan Fimister, a historian and author of Robert Schuman: Neo-scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Schuman’s impetus to create what would later be the European Union was his Catholic faith but, more specifically, “the conscious implementation of Pope Leo XIII’s Neo-Thomistic project”.

Jacques Maritain, a French Catholic convert, political theorist, philosopher and supporter of the European Union, held that democracy and a political unity of nations, as in the case of the United Nations or the EU, were the first steps in the founding of a civilisation based on love. The proposed nature of the EU would create a natural sympathy between itself and the Catholic Church, which alone could provide the supranational entity with the revealed truths, ethical underpinnings and the sacramental grace necessary to sustain it.

Schuman and Maritain both believed that a supranational democracy would become the foundation for a New Christendom. “Europe,” said Schuman, is “the establishment of a generalised democracy in the Christian sense of the word.” Schuman fundamentally believed that the final end of Catholic political action must be the recognition by the civil order of the truth of the Faith which would ultimately result in an increase in conversions to the Church and conversions of heart to Christ.

I thanked the tiny Belgian woman who so delightfully engaged me in conversation. I left the EU shop with an armful of EU memorabilia, some of it kitsch, some of it utilitarian, and stepped out and into the plaza. As I waited to cross the street, a car zoomed past me and as I watched after it I noticed that it, like every other car in the Eurosphere, proudly displayed the circle of 12 golden stars on its licence plate. As I stared at it, I offered a prayer to our Mother, the Queen of Europe, to assist us as we set about re-Christianising the Old Continent.