Dare to Believe

...Now Cardinal Lustiger has made the Catholic Church once again a powerful voice in the land...

...His defense of mandatory celibacy is surprisingly weak when compared with the lucidity of his other views...

...One could even make it a condition that the recognition of the continuing existence of both religions, will be accepted by both sides as God's will and as a condition of DARE TO BELIEVE Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger/Crossroad/$16.95 Franz M. Oppenheimer her problems, the French Catholic Church is gaining a new vibrancy...

...Yet, though baptized, Lustiger, now Aaron Jean-Marie, determined to remain a Jew, a Christian Jew, an identity not widely welcome today...

...the family "had to eat...

...The Cardinal's parents must have been perplexed when their son told them: "I am not leaving you...

...Thus when Cardinal Lustiger speaks as unselfconsciously as a Frenchman, totally immersed in France's Catholic history, tradition, and problems, as if he were a direct descendant of St...

...Some of the Cardinal's sermons and interviews are collected in Dare to Believe, and reading them makes us understand why Cardinal Lustiger is listened to...

...What Cardinal Lustiger and Rabbi Petuchowski have in common is their concentration on religious truth, as opposed to political concerns, which, in Petuchowski's courageously expressed view, have on the Jewish side been largely substituted for religious concerns...

...His father learned to speak French only badly...

...Moreover, he must distress ideologues on the left and on the right by insisting that political perfection is not of this world: "If they imagine that they can achieve justice in this world, if they want to attain an ideal of justice on earth, they reduce it to the measure of their desires and ideas: this is the source of totalitarianism...

...He states as a factthat the cute' de campagne, a significant figure in French culture and literature, will exist no more, and that the new generation of priests are no longer men who have grown up in a protected practicing Catholic environment and who accepted the discipline of the seminary as a matter of course, but men who come to priesthood with critical minds after having had other careers...

...I am becoming what I am...

...The vast majority of French people no longer went to mass...

...In the same vein Cardinal Lustiger must have disconcerted an interviewing rabbi when he told him, "By embracing Christianity, I finally discovered the values of Judaism...

...From this illustration of the Cardinal's conservative theological views, it is clear why he makes both the political and the theological left uncomfortable, even as his concern for the poor countries, his outspoken social views, and his origins, make some on the right uncomfortable...

...But if a Jew wants to convert and takes the initiative in this direction, we do not reject him or her...

...He was born Aaron Lustiger, the son of poor Polish Jewish immigrants who kept a shop in Paris...

...boys he found a Protestant Bible in French, which he read secretly from beginning to end...

...A lthough Christian Jews remained accepted as Jews within the Jewish community for some 100 years after the death of Christ, today the stereotype Jewish response to baptized Jews is scandalized rejection...

...On his part the Cardinal cannot findit easy to have his Jewish condition constantly drawn into question...

...Indeed, if anything proves the Lord's sense of humor, it is the appointment of a Polish Jew to be the Cardinal of Paris...

...Indeed his effort to show that the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches are not all that different from the Roman Church in the practice of insisting on celibate bishops and prohibiting the remarriage of widowed priests struck me as specious...

...He was 19 when the war was over...

...Emphasis mine...

...There is a hint in a recent book on the French episcopate that Jean-Marie Lustiger's removal as chaplain to the Sorbonne and his appointment as rector of an ordinary Paris parish was brought about by old-fashioned types of the French hierarchy who did not take to Father Lustiger's charismatic personality...

...When he was only ten and the family was still together, Aaron managed to get hold of the key to a bookcase his parents kept locked, and there among other books unsuitable for little Jewish 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 such Christian-Jewish dialogue...

...More than one million French people took to the streets in Paris on June 24, 1984, to protest the Socialists' school bill, just about three weeks after the Cardinal had denounced the bill in an interview given to Le Monde...

...Yet the Gospel commands them to go and teach all nations...

...Would this answer have satisfied the American Jewish guardians of the dialogue...

...The Cardinal's Paris radio station, Radio Notre Dame, his sermons, books, articles, and interviews have a daily impact on French life...

...However convincing his arguments may be in justifying his own choice and in justifying an option of celibacy, they are not convincing in justifying mandatory celibacy...

...And thus started a process that Cardinal Lustiger says was "more like a crystallization than a conversion" and led to the boy's decision to become a Christian...

...I'm not going over to the enemy...

...When Hitler's army invaded France in 1940, Lustiger's father fled from Paris to the relative safety of unoccupied France, while his mother stayed in Paris to mind the store...

...It is clear that as Archbishop of Paris one of his most pressing preoccupations is the decline of vocations for the priesthood and the resulting scarcity of priests in France...

...He himself emphasizes that being a Christian is no longer a comfortable status in a largely secular society, for conformity not dissent is the comfortable human condition...

...With all Franz M Oppenheimer, a frequent contributor, is a Washington lawyer...

...When an interviewer from Der Spiegel asked him bluntly whether it wasn't "a contradiction" to become a bishop and to say "I remain a Jew," he replied: "I did not run away from [the Jewish condition] in the days of the yellow star and the concentration camps...

...Less than three weeks after that demonstration President Mitterrand withdrew the bill...

...Yet when he comes to discuss the mandatory celibacy of priests, which is one, if not the major, cause of the loss of priests—a French friend said the other day, "Nobody gets married any more except priests'he rejects peremptorily any thought of reform...

...This view comes close to that of Rabbi Jakob Petuchowski, a professor of Jewish theology at the Reform Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, who wrote in the Swiss journal Orientierung of March 31, 1985, in discussing the problems of Christian-Jewish dialogue: "It will no longer suffice to know of the common 'source' of both religions, but one must see God's Providence and God's Mission in the different roads the two religions have taken...

...I do not see why one would tear me away from it today...

...After all, in the Orthodox churches a graduate from the seminary must marry to be eligible to become a parish priest...

...Thus they could not well oppose their son's decision, for they had no religious alternative to offer him...

...In the United States at least, the organizations of the Jewish establishment require as a condition of such a dialogue that Christians forgo any missionary intention...

...He compares this rupture in tradition with the upheaval in Catholicism produced by the French Revolution that in 1793 wanted to "dechristianize" France by suppressing all Christian references in the mores and the usages of the country...

...on the contrary, I am discovering another way of being a Jew...

...Louis, one might have expected a few barbs from the Israeli journalists along the line of how can you, a Polish Jew, speak almost as an embodiment of the Church of France...

...Soon her shop was confiscated and her apartment pillaged...

...As best as I can understand him, he thus believes that the Jews occupy the original mansion in our Father's house and non-Jewish Christians another mansion...

...But Aaron, who was in-a boarding school, managed to escape into unoccupied France where he joined his father, worked in a factory, started studying chemistry, took part in underground activities, and survived...

...Parts of the collection reviewed may speak only to readers interested in religion...

...This theme of remaining a Jew runs through the longest chapter of this book, the transcript of an interview with two Israeli journalists published originally in the Israeli daily paper Yediot Habaronot in January 1982...

...In turn the stereotype rejection of Jewish Christians is predicated on the conviction that only a rejection of Judaism and Jewishness can explain a Jew's conversion to Christianity...

...In the American Jewish and Zionist establishments it is dogma that Jews have a separate ethnic identity, and that German Jews, in particular, were totally deluded in their conviction of being as German as any other Germans...

...In 1940, when he was 14, his parents gave him their reluctant permission to become baptized...

...As I have discussed in earlier issues of TAS, anti-Semitism was a particularly virulent French disease, and the Catholic clergy and bourgeoisie were its most exposed carriers...

...The defeat of the Socialist government's scheme to "establish a great, unified and lay system of national education," and to make the schools "the crucible of the class struggle," was made possible by Cardinal Lustiger's leadership of the popular uprising in defense of independent private Catholic schools...

...In observing the Cardinal's Israeli in- terlocutors' preoccupation with the supposed conflict between being a Roman Catholic priest and a Jew, I was struck by the omission of any related questions about the Jewish Cardinal's Frenchness...

...Nobody among today's Catholics is aiming to take the Jews away from Judaism at all costs...

...I saw Abraham and David in the stained glass of the cathedral of Chartres...

...It is the passionate defense by a mystic who sees the "spiritual choice" of celibacy as a desirable sacrifice to the Lord...

...When Cardinal Lustiger is asked: "Does Catholicism not have a policy of conversion of the Jews anymore...

...Finally she was arrested, deported, and, like most relatives of the Cardinal, murdered in Auschwitz...

...True, the Cardinal seems not to see a need for the conversion of the Jews, whom he sees as having been given their religious mission under the first covenants the Lord made with Abraham and Noah, and who are therefore a living testimony to the Lord's purpose...

...They were very consciously Jewish in the ethnic sense, but not only non-practicing, but non-religious Jews who believed that "rabbis, priests, they all talk the same rubbish...

...I do not stop being a Jew...

...It was Pope John Paul II who pulled Father Lustiger out of obscurity to make him bishop _of Orleans in 1979, Archbishop of Paris in 1981, and a cardinal in 1983...

...But the thoughts of someone who is clearing away a century's accumulation of rubbish in an ageless institution should be of interest to all...

...While the Cardinal thus does not give an inch when insisting on being a Jew, he becomes somewhat ambiguous in those same interviews when he is asked about the most sensitive question that looms in all contemporary efforts at Jewish-Christian dialogue...

...The very meaning of the word "catholic" is used by the Cardinal to justify placing the Jews apart from heretics and pagans...

...The dominant Zionist posture permits Jews to be anything other than Christians: they may dabble in Buddhism like Ben Gurion, be Marxists, and even proclaim that there is no God...

...If one of the handful of German Jews still left in Germany were a high Christian prelate, and spoke unselfconsciously, as a Jew, a Christian, and a German steeped in German culture, the reactions of the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and B'nai B'rith would make their reaction to Bitburg a vicar's tea party by comparison...

...he answers: "If you mean by this a missionary activity specifically geared to the Jews, no...

...In the interview the reader senses beneath the courtesies some tension on the part of the interviewers, when this Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church makes it clear not only that he is just as Jewish as they are, but that he found being a Christian "a better way of being Jewish," and "my nomination as bishop meant for me that all of a sudden it was as though the crucifix was wearing the yellow star...

...Perhaps reactionary trends in the French episcopate may have at some time interfered with Cardinal Lustiger's career...

...Catholic," he says, does not mean "universal," but the totality of two separate entities, Jews and non-Jews...