Jean-Marie Lustiger

Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger (17 September 1926 – 5 August 2007) was a French cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He was Archbishop of Paris from 1981 until his resignation in 2005. He was made a cardinal in 1983 by Pope John Paul II. His life is depicted in the 2013 film Le métis de Dieu (The Jewish Cardinal). Lustiger was born Aron Lustiger in Paris to a Jewish family.

His parents, Charles and Gisèle Lustiger, were Ashkenazi Jews from Będzin, Poland, who had left Poland around World War I. Lustiger's father ran a hosiery shop. Aron Lustiger studied at the Lycée Montaigne in Paris, where he first encountered anti-Semitism. Visiting Germany in 1937, he was hosted by an anti-Nazi Protestant family whose children had been required to join the Hitler Youth.

Sometime between the ages of ten and twelve, Lustiger came across a Protestant Bible and felt inexplicably attracted to it. On the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the family moved to Orléans. In March 1940, during Holy Week, the 13-year-old Lustiger decided to convert to Roman Catholicism. On 21 August he was baptized as Aron Jean-Marie by the Bishop of Orléans, Jules-Marie-Victor Courcoux.

His sister converted later. In October 1940, the Vichy regime passed the first of many anti-Semitic laws, which forced increasingly strict conditions on Jews in the unoccupied zone. Lustiger, his father, and sister sought refuge in unoccupied southern France, while his mother returned to Paris to run the family business. In September 1942, his mother was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp where she was murdered the following year.

The surviving family returned to Paris at the end of the war. Lustiger's father tried unsuccessfully to have his son's baptism annulled, and even sought the help of the chief rabbi of Paris. Lustiger graduated from the Sorbonne with a literature degree in 1946. He entered the seminary of the Carmelite fathers in Paris, and later the Institut Catholique de Paris.

He first visited Israel in 1951. On 17 April 1954 he was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Émile-Arsène Blanchet, rector of the Institut Catholique. From 1954 to 1959 he was a chaplain at the Sorbonne. For the next ten years, he was the director of Richelieu Centre, which trains university chaplains and counsels lay teachers and students of the grandes écoles, graduate schools such as the ÉNS-Fontenay-Saint-Cloud or the Ecole des Chartes.

From 1969 to 1979, Lustiger was vicar of the Parish of Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal, in the wealthy 16th arrondissement of Paris. His parochial assistant was André Vingt-Trois, who years later would succeed him as Archbishop of Paris. On 10 November 1979, Lustiger was appointed Bishop of Orléans by Pope John Paul II after a 15-month vacancy. John Paul had been advised by Cardinal Paolo Bertoli, who was displeased with a new illustrated Catechism for French urban youth (Pierres vivantes) and was on bad terms with most of the French clergy.

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