French "Jewish" Cardinal Lustiger Dies

Ruchel

Wed, Aug 08 2007, 8:33 am

This is a huge event in Europe, so I'm posting it. As you will see, he had huge friends and huge enemies. My father knew him, and one of my doctors was even hidden with him.

Interestingly, French chief rabbi Joseph Sitruk will be saying kaddish outside of the cathedral for him, as his last wish.

Quote:

Cardinal Lustiger, who died on Sunday aged 80, was the
only Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism to become a French
bishop in modern times.

Lustiger became a Catholic at 14 during the early days
of the German Occupation, and lost his mother two years
later when she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where she
died. He saw his conversion as a natural progression,
believing that Christianity and Judaism were "indissolubly
linked" and that "the New Testament was hidden within the
Old and the Old Testament came to light in the New", since
Christ was the Messiah of Israel.

Lustiger's prominent role as a Jewish convert was
strongly condemned both in Israel and in the Jewish
diaspora. This hostility reached its height in 1995 when he
was invited to address a conference at the Hebrew University
in Tel Aviv on "God's silence during the Holocaust". The
Chief (Ashkenazi) Rabbi disrupted his visit to Israel by
publicly accusing him of "betraying his people and his
religion".

Lustiger, deeply hurt by this attack, replied that it
was the first time he had ever heard that it was "worse to
be baptised than to commit the crimes of Hitler".

Aaron Lustiger was born in Paris on September 17 1926,
the oldest child and only son of Charles and Giselle
Lustiger, who kept a hat shop in Montmartre. His parents,
emigrants from Poland, had started selling goods from a
street stall before prospering and taking French
citizenship. Although the children's grandfather had been a
rabbi, they were given no religious instruction and had a
secular upbringing.

The family spoke French at home, but the parents spoke
Yiddish if they did not wish their children to understand.
The Lustigers moved to an apartment in the 5th
arrondissement, and Aaron attended the Lycée Montaigne,
where he showed great ability in literature and languages.

In 1937 he was sent to stay in Germany with an
anti-Nazi Protestant family whose son was in the Hitler
Youth. Thinking that their visitor was a Gentile, the boy
showed Lustiger a dagger, confiding that the Hitler Youth
intended to kill "all the Jews in Germany during the summer
solstice".

When young, Lustiger wanted to become a doctor. He
later described himself as "a proud child with a difficult
personality". His mother forbade him to read comics and his
father would not let him leave the house during Christian
festivals. But the boy read the Bible secretly, and later
said that he had the impression that he was "reading
something he already knew".

On the outbreak of war in 1939 the family left Paris,
hoping to find a refuge in Orléans. During Holy Week in 1940
Aaron Lustiger disobeyed his father's instructions, and for
the first time visited a church (Orléans cathedral), feeling
a strong attraction to the empty building.

On returning the following day, Good Friday, he
decided to convert. He was instructed by the Bishop of
Orléans and baptised as Aaron Jean-Marie. His parents
reluctantly consented to his conversion, believing that it
was a sensible precaution to take in 1941.

Leaving his children in Orléans, Lustiger's father
moved to the Unoccupied Zone while his mother returned to
Paris to run the shop. When the round-ups of Parisian Jews
started in 1942, Giselle Lustiger was denounced by the
family maid, who wanted to take over the apartment. When
Giselle was arrested by the French police, the Bishop of
Orléans arranged for Jean-Marie to live at a seminary
outside Paris, where he passed his baccalauréat. Later he
rejoined his father and sister in the south of France, where
the family remained in hiding until the Liberation.

After the war Lustiger's father, assisted by the Chief
Rabbi of Paris, tried to get his son's baptism annulled on
the ground that Aaron had converted for empirical reasons,
an argument that Jean-Marie strongly denied. Lustiger
entered the Sorbonne University, where he decided to become
a priest, a decision that caused a complete rift with his
father. In the seminary Lustiger was later remembered as a
stubborn and insubordinate student.

Following his ordination in 1954 Fr Jean-Marie became
assistant chaplain to the Sorbonne and then general chaplain
to the universities of Paris. In 1969 he was given his first
parish, St Jeanne de Chantal in the 16th arrondissement,
from which his fame as a preacher spread. He usually spoke
without notes and with a sincerity, humour and intelligence
that quickly increased the size of the Sunday congregation.

Lustiger's time as a young priest was dominated by the
leading intellects of French Catholicism - Henri de Lubac,
François Mauriac, Paul Claudel and Jacques Maritain - and he
set out to be worthy of that tradition.

He eventually wrote 16 books in which he argued that where
Christian anti-Semitism existed it was a consequence of the
infidelity of Christian nations to Biblical Judaism. He
traced modern anti-Semitism back to the Enlightenment, to
the anti-Semitism of Voltaire, Diderot and Hegel, and to the
preference for individual reason over the teaching of
Christ.

Rationalism he dismissed for its pretensions and its failure
to answer the ultimate questions facing mankind. The great
Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar was so impressed by
Lustiger's published sermons that he translated them into
German to add to his earlier translations of Pascal, Péguy
and Claudel.

Lustiger's ability and unusual background soon attracted the
attention of the papal nuncio, and in 1979 Jean-Paul II made
him a surprise choice as Bishop of Orléans. This appointment
was the start of a warm friendship with the Pope who, after
only 13 months, promoted Lustiger to the archbishopric of
Paris.

Charles Lustiger, who had watched his son's remarkable
progress without enthusiasm, died the following year, by
which time father and son had been reconciled and were able
to pray together. Archbishop Lustiger asked a cousin to say
the Kaddish over his father's grave in the cemetery of
Montparnasse, although the funeral service had to be cut
short because of a bomb warning.

Lustiger was appointed a cardinal in 1982. He took part in
the papal conclave of 2005, by which time he was too ill to
be considered papabile; but if Pope John-Paul II had died
younger, Lustiger would certainly have been among the
favourites to succeed.

As Archbishop of Paris he was a restless reformer,
determined to increase the number of ordinations. After
falling out with the rector of the existing seminary he
opened his own; and, in the course of time, he ordained 200
priests. These represented 15 per cent of the French total,
drawn from a diocese which had two per cent of the
population.

He was suspected of bearing some responsiblity for an
incident during Pope John Paul II's visit to France in 1986
when the entire French clergy were summoned to the remote
country parish of Ars, near Lyon. Once seated they were
given a blistering lecture by the Pope, while Lustiger's
raucous seminarians, seated in the front row, roared their
approval.

Despite his outstanding ability, the French hierarchy never
elected Lustiger to the presidency of the national bishops'
conference, though he was compensated for this slight in
1995 when he was elected by the Académie Française to the
seat formerly occupied by the Cardinal Primate of France.

Lustiger's first political test had come in 1984 under
François Mitterrand's first presidency, when the
anti-clerical minister of education, Alain Savary, tried to
pass a law restricting the rights of Catholic schools.
Lustiger confronted Mitterrand at an icy meeting in the
Elysée Palace that was followed by a peaceful march of
800,000 Catholic protestors. Shortly afterwards Savary
resigned and the bill was abandoned.

Subsequently, Lustiger played a prominent role in dissuading
the Carmelite order from building a controversial convent at
Auschwitz, and in the French bishops' public apology in 1997
for their predecessors' failure to protest against the Vichy
government's anti-Semitic laws. The latter was at the site
of the Drancy concentration camp from which Lustiger's
mother had been deported.

Earlier the same year Lustiger had presided over
Mitterrand's state funeral; a delicate business since the
Socialist Party was opposed to a service at Notre Dame while
Mitterrand's family insisted on one. Eventually, 84 heads of
state attended a ceremony that had everything except the
body of the deceased, which was present at a private family
ceremony held simultaneously at Jarnac, a small town far
from Paris.

One of the last acts of Pope John-Paul II was to accept
Lustiger's resignation as archbishop of Paris, because of
ill health, in 2005.

Lustiger summarised his own life by saying that he had been
"a cardinal, a Jew and the son of an immigrant".

http://groups.google.com/group.....2c888

Quote:

Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jew who converted to Catholicism and rose through church hierarchy to become one of the most influential Roman Catholic figures in France, died Sunday, the Paris archbishop's office said. He was 80.

Lustiger - whose Polish immigrant mother died in the Nazi death camp at
Auschwitz - was archbishop of Paris for 24 years before stepping down in 2005 at the age of 78. Lustiger died in a hospice in Paris, the archbishop's office said. A cause of death was not immediately provided.

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For years, Lustiger was the public face of the church in mainly Roman Catholic France, speaking out on critical issues and serving as a voice of calm wisdom in tumultuous times.

President Nicolas Sarkozy said the country had lost a great figure of spiritual, moral, intellectual and naturally religious life. Archbishop of Paris Andre Vingt-Trois said Lustiger's reflections, and his personal history, led him to play an important role in the evolution of relations between Jews and Christians.

Lustiger kept largely silent on the tragedy of his mother Gisele, killed at the hands of the Nazis. But during France's National Day of Remembrance to commemorate the deportation and death of French Jews during World War II, Lustiger, taking part in the reading of names in 1999, came to his mother's.

Gisele Lustiger, he intoned, then added, ma maman (my mama), before continuing, Catholic World News reported.

The strength of evil can only be answered with an even greater strength of love, Lustiger said at an August 2005 Mass in Lodz, Poland, in memory of the more than 200,000 Jews deported from there to Nazi death camps.

A confidante of former Pope John Paul II, Lustiger represented the then-pontiff at commemoration ceremonies for the 60th anniversary in January 2005 of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where his mother died. It was his second trip to Auschwitz, after a 1983 visit.

I don't want to return, because it is a place of death and destruction, Lustiger told reporters. If I am going, it is because the pope asked me.

Lustiger announced in April 2007 that he was being treated for a grave illness at a Paris hospice for the terminally ill.

On May 31, Lustiger, bound to a wheelchair, made an emotionally charged appearance at the prestigious Academie Francaise to say goodbye to his fellow immortals, as the 40 members of the Academie are known. The author of numerous books, Lustiger was made a member of the Academie Francaise in 1995.

Despite his diminished physical appearance, we felt his fervor, fellow member Jean-Marie Rouart said later.

An atypical archbishop and cardinal, Lustiger appeared to have perfectly synthesized his Jewish heritage with his chosen faith.

Christianity is the fruit of Judaism, he once said.

For me, it was never for an instant a question of denying my Jewish identity. On the contrary, he said in Le Choix de Dieu (The Choice of God), conversations published in 1987.

Born Aaron Lustiger on Sept. 17, 1926 in Paris to Polish immigrant parents who ran a hosiery shop, he was sent to the town of Orleans, 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of the capital, to take refuge from the occupying Nazis. There, Lustiger, who was not a practicing Jew, converted to Catholicism in 1940 at the age of 14, taking the name Jean-Marie.

Two years later, his mother was deported to Auschwitz.

He was ordained a priest in April 17, 1954, in Paris, after earning degrees in philosophy and theology from the Catholic Institute's Carmes Seminary. For 15 years, he served as chaplain to students at the Sorbonne University, reportedly zipping on a motorbike through the winding streets of the Latin Quarter, the Left Bank student neighborhood.

Lustiger was appointed pastor of the Sainte Jeanne de Chantal parish, holding the post for 10 years until 1979, the year he began his swift climb up the hierarchy.

Named bishop of Orleans in 1979, Lustiger was named archbishop of Paris in 1981. Two years later, in 1983, Pope John-Paul II made him a cardinal.

Despite his role as a prince of the Church, Lustiger remained an eminently grass roots figure, creating a Christian radio station, Radio Notre Dame, in 1981 and expounding on issues ranging from the August 2003 heat wave that killed thousands of people in France to the building of a united Europe.

In contrast, Lustiger kept his personal journey of conversion a mostly private matter. However, he called for a true dialogue between Christians and Jews in a 2002 book, La Promesse (The Promise) that delved into Judeo-Christian relations and the mystery of Israel. He specified that Israel in the book was the biblical reference to the Hebrews, not the Jewish state.

The book is a collection of oral meditations made in 1979 to a community of monks as well as more recent addresses at several Jewish conferences.

In an October 2003 interview in the French daily Le Figaro, Lustiger said that the center of living gravity of the Church was moving from its old center to Africa, the Americas and elsewhere, and predicted that, in the third millennium, Asia would become the new land of evangelization.

A funeral Mass for Lustiger was to be held Friday at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the Paris archbishop's office said.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/s......html

Quote:

One day Rabbi Rene-Samuel Sirat was invited to attend a lecture on the Holocaust, held in the amphitheater of the Sorbonne University in Paris. The speaker, a member of the Academie Francaise, moved the audience when he spoke of a Jewish girl who missed out on a golden opportunity to escape a concentration camp to remain near her parents. Eventually, she was sent to her death along with them.

"Next to me sat Cardinal Lustiger," the former chief rabbi of France recalled. "I glanced at his face and saw tears running down his cheeks. At that moment I knew he was remembering his mother, who suffered a similar fate at the Auschwitz death camp."

Lustiger passed away Monday aged 80. Born Aaron Lustiger, he converted to Catholicism when his Jewish German parents sent him to live with a French Catholic family during the Holocaust. He was ultimately appointed to the Church's most senior positions, and served as archbishop of Paris from 1981 until 2005.
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On more than one occasion, Sirat met the cardinal entering Paris' main synagogue. "He would come to say kaddish for his mother," he said.

In 1981, several months after Sirat's appointment as chief rabbi, Jean-Marie Lustiger became archbishop of Paris. The two men became friends. They met frequently, but each time Sirat felt uncomfortable in the presence of the convert who had taken on the mantle of the Catholic church. On the day he was appointed by the Pope, Lustiger declared that he considers himself both a Jew and a Christian, and that he realizes his Judaism by being a devout Christian.

"I could not remain indifferent to these pronouncements," said Sirat, who is currently on a visit to Israel doing research at the Jewish National and University Library. "Together with French rabbis, I harshly criticized the admixture he had made. One of the rabbis wrote in Le Monde that the moment they prove to him that a circle is square, he will accede to the definition that a Jew is the same as a Christian."

Before his appointment in France, Lustiger visited Israel and even contemplated taking a church position here. He knew Hebrew and studied Judaism in depth.

"I was once asked on television what has to happen for Lustiger to be considered Jewish," Sirat said, "so I said that if he returns to the faith, I would even be willing to give up the chief rabbi's seat to him."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/s......html

Quote:

It is no accident that the meshumad Cardinal Lustiger led the delegation to YU. Lustiger himself explained this when he previously said, "I was born Jewish, and so I remain, even if that's unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the non jews. That's my hope and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it" (www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jean_marie_cardinel_lusti.html). Thus, the message of the Church is crystal clear: "Shmad is acceptable. A Jew can become Christian and say kaddish and do a 'kiddush Hashem' as a Jewish Christian. Lustiger is a Jew for Yoshke and is 'acceptable' to Jews. So are all the Jews for Yoshke." Heaven forbid! Let us not allow the Church to manipulate us.

http://www.613.org/rav-cat.htm