Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, RIP

Sunday August 5, 2007

Jean-Marie Lustiger, a French cardinal and former archbishop of Paris, died Sunday, August 5, at the age of 80. For years, Cardinal Lustiger was mentioned by Vatican-watchers as papabile--a possible pope. For many, the possibility was an intriguing one, for Cardinal Lustiger was born in Paris in 1926 to Polish Jews.

He converted to Catholicism along with his sister Arlette in August 1940, after having been sent to Orléans to live with a Catholic family during World War II. Two years later, his mother was sent to Auschwitz, where she would die.

As Aaron Lustiger (his birth name), he was not a practicing Jew; as Jean-Marie (the name he took at his baptism), he became a devout Catholic and determined to become a priest. In 1954, he was ordained to the priesthood; 25 years later, he was elevated to the bishopric of Orléans by Pope John Paul II. Two years later, the same Pope named him archbishop of Paris and, another two years later, elevated Archbishop Lustiger to cardinal.

Cardinal Lustiger was often a controversial figure. A moderate in the Church as a whole, he appeared fairly conservative by the standards of an increasingly liberal and anticlerical France. At his elevation to archbishop of Paris, he stated that "I was born Jewish and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many." Both Catholic traditionalists and Jewish leaders objected to this remark, which (they argued) reduced Jewishness to an ethnic identity or, alternatively, blurred the lines between Judaism and Christianity. Years later, in 1998, Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, protested when a Catholic university gave Cardinal Lustiger an award for helping to advance Catholic-Jewish relations. "It's fine to have him speak at a conference or colloquium," Foxman argued. "But I don't think he should be honored because he converted out, which makes him a poor example."

In his conversion and almost 70 years as a Catholic, Cardinal Lustiger embraced the traditional Christian understanding that Israel of the Old Testament is a type (or foreshadowing) of the Church of the New Testament. Therefore, he saw his conversion not as a renunciation of his Jewish heritage but as the fulfillment of it--a point of view that his critics, both inside and outside the Church, could never share.

Cardinal Lustiger's funeral Mass will be held on Friday at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris.