Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, age 80, dies.

[CBHagman]

The obituary from the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,,2142673,00.html


Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who was the son of a Holocaust victim and converted from Judaism to become France's most influential Catholic of recent decades, has died, church officials said today.

The 80-year-old bishop, whose Polish immigrant mother was killed at Auschwitz, died yesterday at a hospice in Paris, the archbishop of Paris's office said in a statement. He had been gravely ill for some months.

Born Aaron Lustiger in Paris in 1926, the cardinal converted to Catholicism at the age of 14 after being sent with his sister to the city of Orléans, south of Paris, to escape the occupying Nazis.

From The Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501472.html

He was seen as a strong supporter of dialogue among religions and sought vigorously to maintain his ties to Judaism.

(SNIP)

After the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he was sent to live with a Catholic family in Orleans. He was baptized that year, under the name Jean-Marie Lustiger. His father escaped the Nazis by going into hiding. His mother, who tried to maintain the family's textile business, was arrested and deported.

At a French day of remembrance for the deported, he read some of the victims' names. After reading "Gisele Lustiger," according to the Associated Press, he added "ma maman" (my mother).

[DemBones DemBones]

1. The funeral will be Friday at Notre Dame de Paris.

I wonder if EWTN will broadcast it, it would certainly be wonderful to see and to be able to honor his life, since few of us are likely to be attending.


According to the Washington Post article, his parents were nonpracticing Jews but were unhappy with his conversion (as any parent of a young teenager would be.)

"In what was said to be one of the few times he dealt publicly at length with his religious conversion, he told editors of an Israeli newspaper that his parents were upset. He said he told them, 'I am not leaving you. I am not passing into the enemy camp. I'm becoming what I am. I am not stopping being a Jew -- just the opposite. I'm discovering a way of living it.' "

<snip>

Two days after being named , in an interview with a reporter for a Jewish news service, quoted in Current Biography, Cardinal Lustiger said: "I've always considered myself a Jew, even if that's not the opinion of some rabbis."

This did not mean any weakening in his ecclesiastical commitment.

"The West is born of Christianity," he told the New York Times, "and the crisis of the West is that it isn't Christian anymore."