Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger
Jewish convert to Catholicism who became Archbishop of Paris
Published: 07 August 2007
Aaron Lustiger, priest: born Paris 17 September 1926; baptised 1940, taking the name Jean-Marie; ordained priest 1954; Bishop of Orléans 1979-81; Archbishop of Paris 1981-2005; Cardinal 1983-2007; died Paris 5 August 2007.
'What is the difference between the Chief Rabbi of France and Cardinal Lustiger?" a Jewish joke supposedly ran. The answer: "Cardinal Lustiger speaks Yiddish." Born into a Jewish family and a convert to Christianity at the age of 13, Lustiger added piquancy to the question of whether a Jew can also be a Christian. Spoken of by some as papabile, the idea of a Jewish pope teased the imagination.
While his Jewish background gave him an international profile in Jewish-Christian relations, Lustiger's main challenge was to provide leadership to a divided Catholic Church in his native Paris (he never succeeded in being elected to head the French Bishops' Conference). No longer the "eldest daughter of the Church", heavily secularised France has seen a sharp fall in participation in church life in recent decades, with less than 5 per cent of the population regularly attending Mass.
Lustiger's response was close to that of his mentor and patron, Pope John Paul II: to reject the liberalism of recent decades and try to return to eternal verities. Indeed, John Paul had plucked Lustiger from relative obscurity to name him Bishop of Orléans in 1979 to promote this. Lustiger did not disappoint. His faithfulness was rewarded just two years later, when he was made Archbishop of Paris.
Soon after his appointment, he withdrew his seminarians from the Institut Catholique in Paris, regarding its theology as "too speculative", sending them instead to other seminaries he regarded as more sound. Lustiger regarded the role of priest as sacramental and mystical, set apart from the world. He had success, ordaining an above-average number of priests. He also encouraged priests who questioned their vocation to leave.
Lustiger's orthodoxy was clear to all. In 1983 he was one of the few French bishops who failed to defend the French catechism Pierres Vivantes ("Living Stones"), which had come under attack by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
When François Mitterrand's education minister launched plans in 1984 to secularise Catholic schools, Lustiger led the protests. Mitterrand backed down. Amid growing Vatican intolerance of outspoken Bishop Jacques Gaillot of Evreux, Lustiger helped have him removed from his diocese in 1995.
In 1997, amid scepticism from his fellow French bishops, Lustiger enthusiastically backed the World Youth Day in Paris, attended by the pope. More than half a million people flocked to the open-air masses, bewildering journalists. Lustiger patiently explained on television that the younger post-1968 generation, which had largely grown up without faith, was eager to embrace the Gospel.
So much were Lustiger and John Paul seen to be marching in step that on his appointment as a cardinal in 1983, Lustiger felt obliged - with a smile - to deny that he was part of the pope's "Polish mafia".
Lustiger's parents had arrived in France from Poland just before the First World War. Settling in Paris, they ran a clothing shop. The young Aaron, born in 1926, was named after his grandfather, a Silesian rabbi, but the young family never attended synagogue. However, he and his younger sister Arlette were brought up with a sense of their Jewish identity, a commitment to education and strict morality.
Lustiger encountered the Old and New Testaments at his piano teacher's, and recognised what he believed to be the continuity between the two. This knowledge was reinforced in 1937 when he stayed with a Protestant family in Germany. He always disentangled anti-Semitism from the Christian faith.
As German invasion threatened in 1940, his parents placed their two children with a Christian family in Orléans. Lustiger visited Catholic churches in the town out of curiosity. On Maundy Thursday of 1940, he went to the cathedral, where - not knowing the significance of the day - he was transfixed by the flowers and candles. The following day he returned, but found a spiritual emptiness. "I did not know that it was Good Friday," he later recalled. "At that moment I thought: I want to be baptised."
The mother of the family - a practising Catholic - insisted Lustiger had to tell his parents. When he did so, it was "unbearably painful". His parents rejected his argument that he was not abandoning his Jewishness but fulfilling it. They took him to a rabbi and, after the young man had explained why he believed Jesus to be the Messiah, consented to his baptism. He was baptised in Orléans in August 1940, adding Jean-Marie to his existing name Aaron. To his surprise, his sister followed him into Christianity.
Between his visits to the Holy Week services and his baptism, France had been shaken by the Nazi German invasion. Lustiger's father, Charles, left Paris to seek shelter for the family, but his mother, Gisèle, could not bear to abandon the family shop, putting a naïve trust in the goodness of the French. She was betrayed by a neighbour in September 1942, shipped to the Drancy transit camp and then to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in 1943.
Lustiger was reunited with his father after the Germans were pushed out of France. He completed studies in literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, but soon decided to be a priest and entered the Carmelite seminary in Paris in 1946. At his ordination in April 1954, his father watched with mixed emotions from the back of the church.
After ordination, Lustiger worked for 15 years as a chaplain to students at the Sorbonne and as head of an institute training university chaplains. In 1969 he was assigned to a parish in the posh 16th arrondissement, where he became known for his intellectual sermons. By the mid-1960s he was already sought after in Rome as a member of various Vatican agencies.
In 1979, as the then head of the French Church, Cardinal François Marty, was preparing his succession and seeking views on the future path for the Church, Lustiger was encouraged by like-minded colleagues to set out his strategy. His lengthy response was unsparing in its criticism.
Lustiger argued that since the loss of its position as the "Church of power" in 1789, the Church had divided into those seeking the restoration of this power and those who believed in accommodating to secularism and Marxism. He said that this bitter division should be abandoned by no longer seeking to be the Church of power, arguing that instead the Church should seek to re-evangelise France through the conversion of culture.
It is possible Lustiger's memorandum reached Rome and may have triggered John Paul's decision to name him to Orléans in November 1979.
Lustiger's Jewish background gave him a strong interest in Christian- Jewish reconciliation. He was involved in resolving the dispute around a Carmelite convent established within the Auschwitz camp in the late 1980s, which had distressed many Jews. In April 1994, when Pope John Paul marked the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with a Jewish commemoration in the Vatican, Lustiger was there with a German cousin who remained a proud Jew.
Lustiger's fellow Jews did not always agree that his Christianity built on his Judaism. While he was visiting Israel in 1995, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau chose the moment to declare that he had "betrayed his people and his faith during the most difficult and darkest of periods".
Lustiger's own view of his ancestral faith was less troubled. "I was born Jewish, and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim [gentiles]. That is my hope, and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it."
Felix Corley
Independent Offers
A-Z site map
Indy 100 prices
MORE: Travel podcasts
SAVE: Travel offers
FREE: Email headlines