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Ed. This article appeared in The Hebrew Catholic, #85. All Rights Reserved. Jean-Marie Aaron Cardinal Lustiger
Later, in June, 1965, I joined the pilgrimage to the Holy Land which he led. It was he who inspired me to lead pilgrimages to Israel and elsewhere. Much later, I found out that after 15 pilgrimages to Israel and other places, he was appointed in 1969 by the then Archbishop of Paris as parish priest of the Church of Ste. Jeanne de Chantal in the posh 16th arrondissement (district) of Paris, where he stayed for ten years and was very dynamic as a pastor and preacher. It did not surprise the Paris clergy that on 10th November, 1979, Pope John Paul II appointed him Bishop of Orleans, where he and his sister were baptized on 25th August, 1940, in the Bishop’s residence, which in 1979 became his! It was in Orleans that a Catholic family looked after them during the Shoah, but sadly, his Polish-Jewish mother was taken from Paris to Auschwitz and died in the gas chambers in 1943. Then on 31st January, 1981, Pope John Paul appointed Bishop Lustiger as Archbishop of Paris: He was the first Jew ever to sit on the episcopal throne of Paris, the No. 1 diocese of France! He was extremely dedicated to pastoral activity and led numerous conferences in France and elsewhere, even in Australia! As Archbishop of Paris, he was inevitably made a Cardinal on 2nd February, 1983, and used his high office to defend and promote human rights. What also showed that the Pope favored him was his appointment as President Delegate to the First Special Assembly for Europe of the Synod of Bishops in 1991. As a noted writer and intellectual, Cardinal Lustiger was appointed to the highly prestigious Academie francaise (French Academy): This was almost unheard of for a Catholic cleric, and a Jew at that! He retained that position even after resigning at the retirement age, while remaining Archbishop emeritus of Paris as from 11th February, 2005. On a more personal note, when Penny and I visited Paris from 2nd May, 2007, I pre-arranged with the Cardinal’s secretary to visit him at 10:30 a.m. on 3rd May. Sadly, this meeting never took place, since the Cardinal had a serious relapse of his cancer and was taken to palliative care, with virtually no-one allowed to visit him.
Cardinal Lustiger passed away on 5th August, 2007. At his funeral Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, even the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy (whose mother was Jewish, and therefore he is technically Jewish!) attended, as did a vast congregation, many standing on the parvis (forecourt) of the Cathedral. During the Mass, a member of his family said kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead), something unheard of at a Catholic funeral! Also, in largely secular and even anticlerical France, that the President of the Republic and members of the government of France should attend was almost unheard of, but it testifies to the great esteem in which Cardinal Lustiger was held by a wide cross-section of the population. Also, the media, both in print and on television, gave unusually wide publicity to Cardinal Lustiger. Finally, although the Cardinal was buried in the crypt of the Cathedral, which not many could visit, the inscription on his tomb was repeated on a metal plaque, fastened to a column near the high altar of Notre Dame Cathedral, where millions of tourists and worshippers can read it. It is a simple but most moving epitaph, written (I am told) by himself. He says that his original (Jewish) name was “Aaron” (in Hebrew “Aharon”), attributable to the first High Priest, the brother of Moses, while his baptismal names are Jean-Marie, attributable to St. John the Apostle and to the Blessed Virgin Mary. However, what is most remarkable, especially to us Hebrew Catholics, is that he insists that he was. and remains, a Jew. | ||
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I first heard of Pere (Father) Lustiger when I went to study at the Sorbonne (University of Paris) in January, 1965; he was in charge of the Centre-Richelieu, the Catholic student centre.
However, on our return to Australia on 9th July, 2007, I found a most touching hand-written note from the Cardinal: I will treasure it forever.