Brilliant, blunt and bold, French Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger was the quintessential John Paul II bishop, an evangelical Catholic who saw conversion of culture as the order of the day.Lustiger, who died last Sunday week (5th August) in Paris after a two-year struggle with cancer, embraced Christianity's minority status in ultrasecular France, seeing it not as a way station along the path to oblivion but rather as an invitation to beat secular intellectuals at their own game by making an aggressive case for the philosophical truth of Christian doctrines.
This attitude made Cardinal Lustiger an anomaly in French Catholicism. Before him, conservatives were those nostalgic for Christendom, longing to use the coercive power of the state to enforce church precepts. To be modern, meanwhile, was to be leftist.
Lustiger's revolution was to proclaim classic Catholic principles in the context of pluralism and religious freedom, being at once modern and traditional.
Cardinal Lustiger's career, shaped as it was by his biography, also reflected the troubled history of Jewish/Christian relations. He was born Aaron Lustiger on Sept. 17, 1926, into a family of Polish Jewish immigrants who ran a Paris hosiery shop.
In 1940, he was sent to Orleans to take refuge from the invading Nazis. In that city's cathedral, at the age of 14, he converted to Catholicism, taking the name Jean-Marie.
In 1942, Lustiger's mother Gisele was deported to Auschwitz, where she died. His father escaped, and long struggled with his son's conversion.
When Lustiger was ordained a Catholic priest in 1954, his father stayed at the back of the church, refusing to take his reserved seat.
For many years, Lustiger had to remove his clerical dress before going home.
As many families do, father and son resolved this tension largely by not talking about it. Lustiger later said that on his deathbed, his father finally brought himself to address his son by his Christian name, "Jean-Marie."
Lustiger insisted that his Christianity did not mean he had turned his back on Judaism. "I was born a Jew and so I am," he once said. "For me, the vocation of Israel is to bring light to the goyim. That's my hope, and I believe Christianity is the means for achieving it."
John Paul II was a trailblazer in Jewish/Christian relations, and Lustiger was a key lieutenant in that effort.
In 1997, Cardinal Lustiger led the bishops of France in an apology for the church's failure to condemn anti-Semitic laws passed under the Nazi-dominated Vichy regime in 1940.
Some Jewish leaders nevertheless found the prominence given Lustiger by the Vatican in official Jewish/Catholic dialogues troubling. The implicit suggestion, some felt, is that a "good Jew" is one who converts.
In 1995, that discontent came to a head when Lustiger attended a "Silence of God" conference on the Holocaust at Tel Aviv University. Israel's Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau said, "The way in which Aaron Lustiger has chosen to live his life goes hand in hand with the Final Solution. His assimilation is so extreme that, if taken as an example, would help bring about the end of the Jewish people."
Yet Lustiger's efforts at reconciliation were also widely appreciated. Upon his death the World Jewish Congress declared, "The Jewish world has lost one of its closest friends."
French rabbis gathered in front of Notre Dame Cathedral to say the Jewish prayers for the dead.
Lustiger's rise within the church began early and moved quickly, thanks to his evangelical style of Catholicism.
As a university chaplain at the Sorbonne during the leftist turbulence of 1968, he wrote a memo to then-Cardinal François Marty of Paris arguing for a new strategy. It's time to abandon any pretense to power, he said, and aim instead at evangelization. Lustiger became bishop of Orleans in 1979, and archbishop of Paris in 1981.
In an era in which faith has to be a matter of personal conviction rather than an accident of birth, Lustiger brashly proclaimed, "We're really at the dawn of Christianity."
He was utterly at home with laïcité (secularism), yet convinced that, without Christianity, French culture was fated to dissolution.
Lustiger was tough on doctrine and discipline, earning the nickname "the Iron Cardinal."
Yet unlike imperial bishops of ages gone by, he was always ready to debate the underpinnings of his positions, winning admiration in a country where intellectuals enjoy pop culture adulation.
His Sunday evening Masses at the Notre Dame Cathedral, styled as a form of dialogue with French culture, attracted overflow crowds in an era in which the average rate of Mass attendance hovers at around 5%.
In 1995 Lustiger was inducted into the Académie française, the 40-member pantheon of France's leading intellectual lights.
On May 31 of this year, a wheelchair-bound Lustiger made one of his last public appearances at the Académie to bid farewell to his peers. Gazing up at a portrait of one of his ecclesiastical forbears, he said, "I am going to meet up with Cardinal Richelieu!"
Like Richelieu before him, Lustiger will leave a deep impression on the church in France, and for that matter the world.
Now that the two eminences are together, one imagines they'll have a great deal to talk about.
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