No new saint for France to queer her ginned up secular tradition:

A campaign to sanctify the European Union through the beatification of its founding father, Robert Schuman, has run into stiff resistance from the Vatican and now appears likely to fail.

Schuman was born in Luxembourg and raised as a German in Prussian-controlled Metz. He served in the Kaiser's army during the First World War, switching citizenship automatically as France regained Alsace-Lorraine. As French prime minister in 1947, he still spoke with a guttural Germanic accent.

A gangly ascetic, he lived on eggs and lettuce, taking the Eucharist each morning at the chapel of Servants of Sacred Heart near his home. He never married. Konrad Adenauer, the late German chancellor, dubbed him "a saint in a business suit".

Schuman, the French foreign minister who in May 1950 unveiled plans to pool western Europe's coal and steel production, died quietly in bed in Scy-Chazelles near Metz, in 1963, aged 77.

The Schuman Plan, the basis of the European Coal and Steel Community, was the precursor to the European Community seven years later. It was intended to lead to full economic union and ultimately a European federation.

"We need a miracle and we haven't been able to find one," [Jean Moes, a former professor of German history and the leader of the inquiry] said. "All we have is the construction of Europe after the war and Rome does not accept that as a real miracle." [Crummy American dollars don't register on the French miracle meter.]

The drive for his beatification and eventual canonisation was launched by a private group in Metz, the St Benoit Institute, but has acquired powerful backers, including President Jacques Chirac. [French rayonnement must be pretty dim if Secular Jack is slumming at the Vatican for a trophy saint.]

Fifty years later, the EU appears to have turned its back on the deeply Catholic inspiration of its founding statesmen, dropping all reference to God in the draft constitution.

"Schuman would have turned in his grave," said Jacques Paragon, his sponsor for sainthood at the St Benoit Institute.

The sad truth is that France today would have no place for the likes of the saintly M. Schuman.

"Robert Schuman: Architect of Evil, Eeeeviiil!"