A Giant Among Two Peoples, by Fr. Raymond J. De Souza

National Post, August 9, 2007

One of the most extraordinary, and improbable, religious figures of the 20th century will be laid to rest at Notre Dame in Paris tomorrow. Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris from 1981 to 2005, died on Sunday.

Not missing an opportunity to stir up a little Catholic-Jewish tension, the Jerusalem Post headlined the news, "Apostate French Cardinal dead at 80." Apostate? cardinal Lustiger had in fact devoted his entire adult life to arguing just the opposite, that in converting from Judaism to Catholicism he remained what he was, and had not abandoned the faith of Israel.

Born in 1926 in Parish, Aaron Lustiger was the son of Polsih Jews who had immigrated to France. After the outbreak of the war in 1939, he and his sister went to live with a Catholic family who offered them refuge. Raised by parents indifferent in the practice of their Jewish faith, the young Aaron and his sister were impressed with the Catholicism of their host family. They both asked to become Catholics, and were baptized in August 1940, with Aaron taking the name Jean-Marie. In 1942 Lustiger's parents were deported to Auschwitz; his father would survive the Holocaust, but his mother was killed there.

Ordained a priest in 1954, Lustiger served first as a chaplain at the Sorbonne, where his brilliance was immediately apparent. He became a passionate advocate for a French Catholicism which no longer sought the privileges of the ancien regime, but rather sought only to re-evangelize the culture of the Church's "eldest daughter." Twenty-five years later, he caught the attention of the newly-elected Pope John Paul II, who appointed him bishop of Orleans in 1979. The new bishop Lustiger wrote to the Polish Pope, saying that perhaps it was not a good idea to appoint a Jewish convert to be a French bishop. John Paul responded by making him archbishop of Paris only 14 months later. It was one of the most important appointments he would ever make.

Lustiger was a remarkably innovative and successful evangelist and pastor, perhaps one of the greatest archbishops in the history of Paris. But it was the novelty of his Jewishness that attracted attention even to the end. "I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable to many," he once said. "For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the Gentiles. That is my hope and I believe Christianity is the means for achieving it." He worked tirelessly for the Catholic-Jewish dialogue, and represented in his own person the reality that Judaism is, in the words of John Paul II, the "elder brother" of Christianity. In the 1980s, he led the french bishops in acknowledging the moral failures of many French Catholics during the war and the Holocaust.

He was reluctant to visit Auschwitz, the site of his mother's death. Nevertheless, John Paul sent him as his personal representative to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp in 2005. He returned again in 2006 at the side of Pope Benedict XVI, and heard him say this: "The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. by destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."

Cardinal Lustiger was the fruit of that taproot in a particular way by birth. His theological conviction was that all Christians spring from the same source, which remains alive and an instrument of God's providence. God remains always faithful to His promises, including the promise to Abraham and the chosen people. "[Cardinal Lustiger] was the image of the trials that life led him to cross, and that were above all the trials of Europe across the 20th century," said French President Nicholas Sarkozy. "These trials forged a man of character, but also one of social engagement and of a free spirit and mind, who never gave or did anything halfway."

Indeed, Cardinal Lustiger was a man in full. Whether preaching in his cathedral, leading processions through Paris, writing books, engaging with intellectuals and journalists, discoursing as a member of the Academie Francaise, contesting public affairs, or hosting his great friend John Paul at the triumphal Paris World Youth Day in 1997, he was a giant among his own people. Or peoples, for he ennobled the glorious history of the Church of France, and remained always a son of Israel, and a son of Rome.