The force of Cardinal Lustiger
Englund, Steven
already too late to wipe away the record of half-hearted treatment Amerasians have suffered for so long. This is why the most haunting question that surrounds the issue is not: "When will...
...It's a classic story," he says, "repeated all over Paris...
...The cardinal hasn't the slightest interest in the problems and conflicts of church, society, and state that undedy French Catholicism...
...The cardinal set the example: each week finds him celebrating the '(packed) 6:30 Mass at Notre-Dame...
...The issue of his Jewishness had been endlessly raised in the media, the church, and not least, among Jews in Europe and even the U.S...
...The declining fortunes of that church keenly wounded Marty and his colleagues, but few of them, and certainly not Marry...
...The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr Selected Essays and Addresses edited and introduced by Robert McAfee Brown The best essays of one of the major theologians of our century, now'brought together in one volume fbr the first time...
...all were extemporized "from the heart...
...Fred, on the surface at least, is a cocky man, playfully Commonweal: 248...
...He died a marginalized and anguished man...
...not one of them, until now, has dared to conduct such a ceremony...
...The other candidate, Albert Decourtnay, Bishop of Dijon, declined for reasons of health...
...Stage ALL IN THE FAMILY 'PRECIOUS SONS' G EORGE FURTH'S Precious Sons is an old-fashioned play, suggesting the period in which it is set...
...Nor was he an eloquent and focused spokesman for the French church, a position he was expected to hold by virtue of being twice elected president of the Episcopal Conference (19691975...
...Does De ia Morandais now share his bishop's spirituality and theology, or approve of all his policies in the archdiocese...
...Lustiger disapproved of the students' actions -- nobody in the Paris church publicly did that...
...In 1963, 80 percent of Catholics were married in a church...
...I T SHOULD be clear by now-thai it would be unwise, and almost impossible, to try to draw neat distinctions between what Lustiger refers to as m 9 stratdgie and the man himself...
...Good with popes, presidents, and parishioners, Lustiger has a much harder time with priests and fellow bishops...
...The message turns to hope, but it is the Resurrection, the aftermath of the self-destruction of civilization...
...In'the late fifties, nine of ten Catholic infants were baptized...
...A part of thr problem is that many ex-priests work for one or another.;of these newspapers, magazines, or reviews, and they constitute perhaps the only breed of homo sapiens toward whom Jean-Made Lustiger is irremediably antagonistic...
...Before the man's profound conviction and reasoning, and especially before his unswerving respect for Judaism, the chief rabbis backed off...
...For though he admires the courage of the Catholic Action pioneers, it is "a way that led straight to the ghetto," he says, "when it did not abandon the faith ialtogether...
...He did so shyly and reluctantly, but he felt he could not escape candor in these matters...
...The pastor's concerns and his modus operandi kept him apart from the rest of the Paris clergy...
...Laity, too, may enroll in a special two-year course that Lustiger has established for them and graduate into important roles in church life at the grassroots...
...The cardinal understandably regarded this as something of a go-for-broke credo...
...De Chalendar reads Teilhard and finds his inspiration in the Incarnation and the Resurrection...
...Two other men were approached be'fore Lustiger...
...No serious-minded person simply blames this state of affairs on the tradition of "Catholic Action" or the present French episcopacy...
...Indeed, Lustiger had already raised the hackles of the chief rabbis of France and Israel with his informal remarks about considering himself still to be a Jew...
...My successor and his successor won't have to hide anymore...
...And though he appointed one bishop to replace them, Lustiger hasn't shown much taste for episcopal assistance...
...He has been very lucky so far...
...For the moment, Paris is an exciting spiritual place to be...
...After a year here, some seminarians are judged able to withstand the adulterated preparation at the local seminaries, but others are packed off to places like Louvain where Lustiger has greater faith in the priestly formation available...
...And for that reason he is rejected and killed . . . . How would you wish me to cease being a Jew, even if I wished to, which I do n o t ? . . . It does not fall to man to decide what he is to be, but first to God . . . . I have never ceased being a Jew . . . . My profound hope is that Christians do not forget that they are grafted onto the unique root that is Israel...
...As extraordinary as this assemblage was in the long, conflict-ridden history of church-state relations in France, it was already what one might be tempted to call old red hat...
...As he became older, Msgr...
...Let us talk more closely to some of his fiercest critics...
...It isn't clear whether Mauroy did or didn't break his word...
...As a historian he knows that "the times" play a crucial role in such phenomena, but he grants that Lustiger has been "indispensable...
...I doubt that he is as aware as many of his allies are that in his early years as archbishop he very nearly permanently divided his diocese and indeed the entire French church...
...The force of Cardinal Lustiger I II STEVEN ENGLUND L AST SUMMER, the archbishop of Pads, Jean-Made Cardinal Lustiger, celebrated a Mass in the cathedral of Notre-Dame for the fortieth anniversary of the liberation of his see from the Nazis...
...L USTIGER'S origins and religious viewpoint are only the beginning (if the most important) of the ways in which he differs from his fellow French bishops...
...The proposed Savary Law unexpectedly set off the largest popular protest in France since 1968...
...He is not a team player...
...Word went out to the 900-odd priests of the archdiocese that the ~adsh, not ad hoc Commonweal: 244A collection of Cardinal Lustiger:s homilies, addresses, 9 and int~'views, Dare to Believe ($16.95,260pp...
...but if a bishop had equivocated in the same way Mauroy did, he would have been flayed alive by the government and the press for conduct unbecoming a clergyman...
...Nevertheless, he trusts the cardinal's commitment to the church, and believes that the cardinal trusts his...
...Lustiger's energy and strategy have been painful for many, but very, very few think him fundamentally destructive...
...it is the hope that God and his love abide when the world has passed away...
...the church itself' comes las0 is "to create a resurgence in spiritual fervor in the bosom of the practicing church" -- something like charismarie renewal...
...I am interested in the church of France reasserting its ancient right to be a major force and voice in the nation...
...A majority of Catholic publications, including the important mass circulation magazine La Vie, is anchored in the Action Catholique mentality...
...One understands why: For me as a child [in Germany and France in the late thirties and the war] Judaism was a historical condition of being persecuted -- a condition I didn't for one instant wish to escape, but which found its fulfillment or significance for me only in recognizing and receiving the figure of Jesus, Messiah of Israel...
...This otherness is frequently a source of anguish to the cardinal, but so far, it has served him well in imposing his will on his diocese, his fellow bishops, and the huge outlying "sea" where Lustiger does so much of his "fishing...
...but one that will remain long after the last Amerasian face has been scrutinized in Ho Chi Minh City...
...The cardinal's third goal (note the order...
...They of course don't share Lustiger's views, but they quietly respect the man who holds them...
...He doubts their good faith and imagines they are principally motivated by the desire to turn a profit...
...Though they say little about the major issues of the day, the sermons by no means lack insight into the human condition or the difficulties and challenges of faith...
...It was very difficult for De la Morandais to adapt to parish work at Notre-Dame du Travail...
...or "When will I I , p ~ relations begin...
...Lustiger was assigned by the pope to an important committee to draft the closing address to the world...
...Uncharacteristically punctilious on this occasion, Lustiger wrote out his sermon which included a set of excerpts drawn from Father de Lubac's clandestine wartime writings in Tdmoignage Chr~tien...
...The priests' senate lost all significance and, in the words of one of its members, became a "commiseration club" for its sixty-odd representatives...
...Lustiger, if asked, readily grants that his opinion of Riob~'s leadership is almost entirely critical...
...It fell to an 6migr6 Jew who'd lost his mother at Auschwitz, who'd converted at fourteen, and who was foreign to the traditions of French Catholicism to have "recovered the honor of the church of France...
...He became an outspoken pacifist and critic of all forms of authority, including clerical...
...There is a sense in which people feel compelled to acknowledge a prophet's authority while no Frenchman would bend his knee to a mere cardinal...
...He founded his own pre-seminary (La M'aison St...
...He was collegial and nondirective...
...is an element of strength...
...Berger's words are more relevant to the philosophers and theologians around Communio than to Lustiger himself, whose mind is actually far from closed to new ideas in theology though no longer much concerned with the "intellectual doubt" of his student days...
...It is vintage Lustiger, at once eloquent and pessimistic, an almost unbearable threnody of the "catastrophes," "the tragedies and crimes," and "hungers and hatreds" of our age, imploring God to "look at the darkness in which our hopes and our projects are engulfed," yet beseeching him to explain his absence...
...His gamble has somewhat paid off: there has been a modest upsurge in Mass attendance and in the number of men entering seminary...
...But Cardinal Lustiger's closest, call has come within the church of France...
...In part, of course, certain fellow clerics are jealous of his visibility, just as some resent him for not being a "member of the club...
...In the words of the head of Christian Media, the bishops' PR-office, this archbishop is the church's phare (lighthouse, beacon, headlights~ in FrahcC...
...After ordination (in 1954) he served for fifteen years as chaplain at the University of Paris...
...If the Orleans appointment was a surprise, the translation to Pads left everyone (including Lustiger) stunned...
...Both in print and on the tube Lustiger doesn't come across as seamless and sleek...
...they do not, for example, learn counseling or T-group techniques nor even read much orthodox (let alone liberation) theology...
...An unquestionable excitement and spiritual renewal are afoot in Paris, and almost no one denies that this archbishop plays the leading role...
...The cardinal is repudiating what he sees as a fundamental tenet of the French era of "Catholic Action" -- the effort to adapt itself to French society, eliminating distinctly Catholic practices that were viewed as barriers to successfully "missionizing" an anti-religious working class and a secular culture...
...Fesquet can, and does, excoriate Lustiger on given actions, but remains "cautiously optimistic" about his episcopate, in part because "the older approaches are maybe running out of steam," and because Lustiger himself "possesses rare qualities...
...At the time of the ~cole libre debate, he broke ranks in a most public fashion...
...They mark moments in the emergence of the church from its ghetto in this country...
...In two years both the priest and his parish have grown considerably...
...There were 41,000 priests in France in 1965...
...Certainly the far right -- the Lepenistes (followers of Le Pen) and the intdgristes (followers of Lefebvre) -- are incomparably more critical of "the Jew," as one reactionary speaker called Lustiger, than are the Communists or the Socialists...
...Lustiger, by contrast, reaches back for inspiration to the early twentieth century, to the French "Catholic Renaissance" associated with famous converts or "born-agains" like Claudel, Bloy, P~guy, and the young Maritain...
...In the eyes of government and the media, he is probably regarded as the de facto spokesperson for Catholicism in France...
...Catholic Action groups, would be the central unit of church life, and that the liturgy would be the center of padsh life...
...On entering office, he instantly sacked his predecessor's right-hand man...
...There are two plays at war within Furth's script: the tougher one finally falls victim to a sense of popular drama that has marked most of Furth's work...
...But for some years now, there has been a feeling that a new approach and new blood are badly needed...
...The students and workers of the 1968 dv~nements found in Lustiger considerably less of an uncritical fellow traveler than they found in much of the Paris clergy...
...till now, he'd spent most of his Commonweal: 246priestly life either in academe or in journalism...
...Within a few years, scores and scores of permanent deacons will emerge...
...He really is a Jewish cardinal...
...his "accomplice" (his word) was a priest of pristine lineage, a man who'd early joined the Resistance, and whose only error in life was to have angered Rome with theological views for which a later pope made him a cardinal: Henri de Lubac, S.J...
...attend...
...Lustiger did not stand alone at the altar...
...Indeed the cardinal has been "lucky," but luck isn't all or most of the explanation of his success...
...he replied in mild disgust, "I mean God...
...Here he has created for himself a unique position in the church of France...
...Jeanne was on personal conversion and prayer, reflected in a kind of piety that the Germans call geff~hl (sentimental...
...I tried to write in the language of the Gospel," Lustiger explained later...
...He was known as a loner in those years, though he occasionally came to the public's attention as a highly skilled commentator on Catholic radio for the pope's visits to France...
...But Riob6 was sensitive and loving and it was a source of pain to him to be the b~te noire among bishops...
...Nothing communicates the strength and appeal of Lustiger as pastor better than a collection of homilies he published shortly before leaving Ste...
...The pope...
...Furthermore, the Jewish community was not the only audience which the cardinal intended to address with these words...
...will be published by Crossroad Books in July, and a second bcmk, Dare to Live, dealing with social and moral issues, will follow next year...
...Since that time, four men have steered Peter's barque in Pads...
...He is far more available for interviews by the secular French and foreign press than he is by reporters of the independent Catholic publications...
...But the point to notice here is the contrast between the new archbishop and...
...worrisome despite Cardinal Lustiger's insistence that he stands au-dessus de la m~lde...
...Throughout the crisis, Lustiger and Mitterrand remained in contact, which may have facilitated the swiftness with which the President of the Republic abandoned his prime minister and education minister, and bowed to force majeure...
...It is impossible not to see Lustiger's appointment as a virtual disavowal of the preceding stewardship -- the more so as the new bishop said nothing of Riob6 in his early speeches, and thereafter mentioned him only very rarely...
...They study Scripture and discuss it...
...No, for heaven's sake, what do you take us for...
...You have to search way back in the annals of the archdiocese to find a predecessor who did that...
...The meditations are emotional, intense, highly spiritual reflections on the Sabbath Scriptures, obviously intended to be only one part of a larger eucharistic liturgy...
...Lustiger has never been especially pleased with Le Monde's coverage of church matters...
...Figures pertaining to clergy are more depressing...
...In a better world, this memorial service would have been unexceptional, but in the France of the Fourth or Fifth Republics, it was unheard of...
...In the words of Ren6 R6mond, the distinguished French historian and strong Lustiger supporter, "His actions and reactions are intuitive, but they can be dead wrong...
...He won't let people go till he's answered all their questions and done his damndest to bring them round to his viewpoint...
...This cardinal is in many regards, "the most important thing that's happened to the church in France in my lifetime...
...Lustiger is a strong man for whom, in Tillich's further words, "Love...
...Lustiger also lost no time in taking in hand the formation of priests...
...Some who were too deeply implicated with the sixties' and seventies' pastoral style and viewpoirit got demoted and/or ignored...
...With that, De la Morandais found himself assigned to a run-down, Sl~arsely-attended parish in an outlying quartier of an outlying arrondissement...
...At the very least they explain, in part, Lustiger's conception of his own mission, which I shall get to in a moment...
...The wartime archbishop of Pads, Suhard, had somewhat soiled the church's linen by his ambiguous relations with Vichy and Berlin...
...Pastors and assistants got shifted around the diocese like so many chess pieces...
...Since this interview, he has never again touched on such things...
...The man here counts for more than the times or the office in explaining change...
...Lustiger is an extremely complex man...
...PROPHET OF RENEWAL OR RETRENCHMENT...
...The bishops -- mostly men of the Marty and Riob~ ilk -- were paralyzed by ambivalence, for the grass-roots groundswell was loudly championed (if in no sense caused) by right-wing political parties...
...The episcopate of Jean-Marie Lustiger -- its weaknesses and its strengths -- may be epitomized in these events and words, but to really understand them, to give the man his due as well as to prepare the ground for a critique, you have to take a brief look at the state of affairs that preceded his astonishing appearance in French public life, Few post-industrial nations have more dismal statistics where religion is concerned...
...today there are 28,630, and one priest in three is over sixty-five years of age...
...Though he may also be warm and very funny, what is compelling in Lustiger is his force of will...
...Jeanne de Chantal...
...There is a distinctly airless quality about the theology that the harbingers of the French spiritual renewal rely upon, as well as a certain contempt for mundane historical reality...
...It is telling that one of Lustiger's key supporters -- the philosopher JeanLuc Marion, co-founder of the French edition of Communio -- looked forward to the right's return to power, not because he or Lustiger supports the right, but so that the church in Paris might demonstrate its distance from a conservative government...
...The cardinal is no less interested in the training of laity and deacons for parish work...
...church of giving major episcopal appointments to religious...
...Father Alain De la Morandais is a middle-aged intellectual who was beside himself when the cardinal sacked him from the news team at Radio Notre-Dame...
...When you watch him on TV or giving a homily, phrases like "a mighty fortress" or"tower of strength" stream through your head...
...As intensely personal as they are in one sense, the viewpoints stated on Judaism and its relationship to Chrisianity pack great meaning, an entire theology...
...The Episcopal Conference reluctantly accepted a leadership role and initiated negotiations with Mauroy and Savary...
...Lustiger has read them, one is forced to say, "religiously" and deeply resonates to their fervent, interiorized Catholicism, to their neo- (or rediscovered) orthodoxy that sought to bend the profane world to the sacred, not embark upon the "hope-less quest of trying to suit eternal revelation to the passing illusions and idols of society's fancy...
...If, to paraphrase P6guy, the mystique hasn't once again degenerated into politique, it is because both sides are in the last analysis guided by their love of the Church and their respect for each other...
...At this rate there will be dioceses without priests by the turn of the century...
...The emphasis at Ste...
...What is remarkable is that he won his gamble: he doused the fire in oil, as it were...
...He let others go into retirement or occupy offices where they were not heard from again...
...Lustiger, however, was frustrated and disgusted by what he saw as the excessive hesitancy and caution of his colleagues...
...As one American has put it: "History is going to ask why we didn't take our children in all at once...
...Cardinal Ratzinger used the opportunity to condemn the French bishops for~ among other things, their failure to develop a unified national catechism in place of the rather open-ended and thematic volume, Pierres Vivantes (Living Stones), judged inappropriate by Rome for the indoctrination of the young...
...He hopes to reawaken "the latent Catholicism in the hearts of the great body of Frenchmen" and to do this by preaching the Gospel from "every pulpit I can climb into...
...This is why the most haunting question that surrounds the issue is not: "When will processing resume...
...Fundamentally, Lustiger doesn't understand what the Catholic press is about...
...Understand why I tell you these things," he says earnestly, "they do not reflect on me but on the church...
...The list could be drawn out with the names of more journalists, priests, professors, and bishops...
...Beaut|fully selected and edited, they show that Niebuhr's tier), polemics and gracious assurances still speak with [x)wer to us today...
...One of Lustiger's most serious fauxpas concerns the Catholic press, which in France, unlike the U.S., is large, diverse, independent, and often profitable...
...As at the Sorbonne, so here, he got on extremely well with his flock, but there was never any doubt about who was in charge (the pastor) and what was the focus of parish life (the liturgy...
...He does feel, however, that the spiritual renewal at Notre-Dame du Travail reflects a phenomenon occurring around the capital...
...De Chalendar is too senior to be pushed around (he was Lustiger's boss for a while in the late sixties), but the pastoral center he runs is not a parish and enjoys zero priority with Lustiger...
...But concrete human beings do not exist in such a realm...
...For example, he took a degree in letters from the Sorbonne (most French bishops go directly to seminary...
...Judaism for me [as the child of entirely secularized parents] had no other religious content than what I discovered in Christianity . . . . What is a Jew [religiously speaking].., but the bearer of the chosenness of another [un homme porteur d'une dlection pour autrui...
...Talking with the cleric-chief of Christian Media, I was told, "Sometimes when Monseigneur Lustiger speaks, people sense there's someone behind him...
...And that root abides...
...In fairness to these critics, Lustiger can be vulgar, abrasive, obstinate, and temperamental...
...A brief journey through a thick file of newspaper clips will show the reader that Lustiger's episcopate has coincided with a "return" of many Catholic voters to right-wing political affiliations after a one- or two-year sojourn on the Mitterrandist left...
...Lustiger's sympathies lie with Ratzinger...
...De Chalendar knows he and the cardinal will never agree about most issues pertaining to church governance or sexual morality...
...His greatest interest and energy is reserved for the world beyond the perimeter of the archdiocese...
...now fewer than two-thirds are...
...This remarkable gift for public address, and personal magnetism, brought Lustiger to the attention of the apostolic delegate to France, Msgr...
...The characters, particularly the parents, Fred and Bea, are somewhat raunchier than their counterparts would have been in the late 1940s, but otherwise Furth's attention to period detail and midwestern idiom gives his play the verisimilitude expected in the heyday of that genre...
...Though traditional in his background, Riob6 late in life met Dom Helder Camara and experi25 April 1986:243enced a kind of rebirth into social Christianity...
...Lustiger travels to Rome far more often than French business requires, and the pope has periodically conferred on him assignments that bespeak confidence...
...A realistic play with a clearly discernible plot, it takes place in Chicago in 1949 and, in four scenes spread across three days, it tells the story of the brief hope and discarded dreams of a working-class father who passes up his chance for promotion and watches his sons go off to destinations other than the ones he set for them...
...had any new ideas...
...He called one of its reporters a "shit-raker" (fouille-merde...
...cal dimensions of the spiritual renewal, for example, are...
...But if the concern is that the masses are being hoodwinked by a lightweight with a gift of gab and no follow-through, then Lustiger isn't disquieting...
...This is not the sort of action to arouse the cardinal's respect...
...He had a stormy interview with his bishop in which he was told that he was "a rather worldly priest" with "too many connections in society" who needed "to 'thin down' a bit...
...Lustiger's next assignment was a parish in the well-heeled sixteenth arrondissement, Ste...
...Furth's Broadway touches in Precious Sons come in the firstact and final curtains...
...The draft incited fourteen interventions by bishops, only four of them positive, and the others running from mild criticisms to excoriations, along the lines of finding the message "dour," "pessimistic," and "Manichean...
...Those church-related institutions beyond the cardinal's reach also came in for their share of trouble...
...Eighteen months earlier, on his elevation to the cardinalate, Lustiger had held an official reception in his residence which every important politician, from Mitterrand on down, chose to STEVEN ENGLUND teaches French history at the Universit~ de ParisVIII and is writing a book on French nationalism...
...Father Xavier de Chalendar is an older, highly respected priest in the archdiocese -- a member of the priests' senate aiad the head of Le Centre Pastorale at St...
...It's a sign of the times that one of the frequent news commentators at Radio Notre-Dame is now a religion editor from the conservative Le Figaro, replacing a correspondent from the left-wing Le Monde...
...It is not that Fr...
...The other "outsider" in a high place with whom the cardinal has developed a personal relationship is Franqois Mitterrand, whom Lustiger sees or talks to on the telephone on a purely private basis...
...In political terms, he and John Paul stand for the reassertion of a highly spiritualized brand of conservative, ultramontane neoorthodoxy...
...I want to put these stale debates and clashes behind us...
...Marty was a classic illustration of the French pastoral bishop of the seventies...
...A agon Lustiger (he added JeanMade at his baptism and no longer uses Aaron although he has not dropped i0 would not flinch if you described him as servant or shepherd or pastor, but such traditional notions fall vaguely off-center...
...The interminable church-state turmoil is over in France...
...T HE FOREGOING is only the briefest account of Lustiger's work within the archdioceses where he has had the effect of a dither along a dormant electrical line...
...The playwright and the performers create a sense of family out of and beyond the constant bickering...
...Sparkling gems.., brought from the shadows of history into contemporary light...
...His formation and career depart rather sharply from the ~ traditional routes...
...For most of its long life, La Vie was called La Vie Catholique, but in an effort to "adapt," it dropped the adjective...
...It isn't necessary to strain the cortex to see what befriends a socialist-atheist and a prophet-archbishop both of whom admire (and possess) forcefulness and intelligence, and in whose mutual interest it is to maintain harmony between church and state...
...A similar soapiness predominated in the book Furth did for Stephen Sondheim's Company (1970...
...No man in secular journalism ranks higher on Lustiger's S-List (the cardinal is capable of using such expressions) than Henri Fesquet, now the retired religion editor of Le Monde, and undoubtedly one of the most knowledgeable journalists in France about the church...
...As the priest soon discovered, Plaisance was an area of Paris where Catholic Action had violently pitted the working class against "the independents" (the bourgeoisie), while proving, in the long run, unable to "missionize" either group...
...Nevertheless, he isn't your garden variety "great communicator...
...N EVERTHELESS, the chief worry to my mind isn't politics without, but rather within, the church and the faith...
...One is tempted to say that his most singular trait is his singularity -- his differentness from any known model in the French church...
...The "convert syndrome" doesn't go far in explaining Lustiger...
...In 1984, only 111 men were ordained to the priesthood...
...No one in the' archdiocese seems to be familiar with the kind of serious criticism that Peter Berger, for instance, makes of Christian neo-orthodoxy in his remarkable The Heretical Imperative...
...Dominating the group, Lustiger wrote the draft that was submitted to the plenary session...
...The congregation included many of the most important leaders of French state and society...
...Francois Marty is certainly a more astute and sly man than the peasant curd de village he adores to portray himself as, but he was not a strong leader of the sprawling Pads archdiocese, (since reduced in size by the creation of suburban dioceses...
...Always strongly progressive in social and political questions (like most bishops in France), he increasingly broke ranks with his colleagues on matters of sexuality, morality, and church affairs...
...The politi...
...it's that he refrained from "running with the hounds...
...Their separate peace functioned usefully at the time of the great ~cole libre set-to of 1983-84...
...I answered knowingly (vox episcopus vox pontifex is a commonplace in Pads these days...
...Lustiger created new parishes and revived old ones even when numbers of priests or faithful hardly seemed to justify it...
...Nor did Cardinal Lustiger bask in episcopal approval when he invited the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to give several lectures and speeches in Paris...
...he is rapidly becoming a media star...
...Lustiger's close relations with the pope have been exaggerated, but it is not fanciful to imagine that the two "outsiders" -- the Pole in Rome and the Polish-German Jew in Pads -25 April 1986:245share a condition that engenders trust...
...The force working for and against the three of them is the wife and mother, a determined, manipulative, sometimes hysterical woman who knows what she wants and gets it...
...the government was obliged to back off...
...There are other eloquent bishops in the country, but to read the papers or listen to radio or watch television, you'd think there was only Lustiger...
...The formation given these men and women is intensely spiritual and traditional...
...De Gaulle, on re-entering his capital, had not seen fit to associate the cardinal in the joyous "Magnificat" sung in Notre-Dame...
...his bishop "reads von Balthasar and finds his themes in the cross and suffering...
...Key members of the news team at Radio Notre-Dame, the popular church radio station in Pads, got sacked because they obstinately upheld "the old spirit" in the teeth of the new archbishop...
...He later recovered and was immediately-appointed to the second most important position in the French hierarchy: the archdiocese of Lyon...
...Nothing of the new bishop's eighteen months at Orltans is as revelatory of his intended role in the French church as the sheer contrast between him and his predecessor...
...Yet Lustiger and his critics sfiare a mutual commitment to what they all see as the mystical body of Christ in the world: the church...
...I tried so hard to avoid merely ecclesiastical issues and debates, but they didn't hear me...
...Pardon me my audacity," he says, "but as a Jew, I can talk like no other Catholic in France...
...I have lingered with this priest not because his story is exceptional, but because it is exemplary of a score of others I gathered...
...Nevertheless, Lustiger has more than once failed to keep in mind the political context, or assumed he could "transcend" it, and has appeared publicly as the ally of right-wing parties with whom, in truth, he has nothing in common...
...His staff privately deplores this, and Lustiger himself is sheepish when confronted with it...
...In a spellbinding interview by two Israeli journalists in 1982, Lustiger spoke about his past and his faith...
...One, fresh out of high school, gets married, thus assuring that he will go on the assembly line, not to college...
...But he sensed the cardinal was right in his prescription for him, and he set to work...
...The Mauroy government, motivated by hoary anticlericalist campaign promises, moved to nationalize all private (mostly Catholic) schools...
...A problem underlying all such skirmishes is that "Monseigneur Outsider Complet," "Monseigneur Self-Made Man," "Monseigneur le Bulldozer d'Archev~que" (to list a few of the epithets I collected from critics) is the battering ram of Rome's attack on six decades of French Catholicism...
...Guy-Made Riob6 epitomized in exaggeration the style and outlook of the French episcopacy in the last years of Paul VI...
...But in this, Catholics are no different from a large group of centrist voters disillusioned (for one reason or another) with the Socialists' performance since 1981...
...The great majority admire this man for his "rare qualities" and believe that his overall impact on the church is beneficial, although they are emotionally sympathetic to traditions and outlooks foreign to Lustiger...
...De Gaulle said the same thing, and we know it meant, in effect, he was conservative...
...And of course he is a principal candidate for the presidency of the Coramonweah 242Episcopal Conference -- at least till now...
...hedid not do graduate work in Rome, nor serve in papal diplomacy, nor ever work in the formation of priests (e.g., as a seminary professor or dean...
...Suddenly, she seems genuinely demented, as crazy as Fred keeps saying she is...
...Augustin) where his hand-selected novices are trained by hand-selected teachers, all under the close scrutiny of Lustiger who knows each man personally...
...And he rejected out of hand the "exploded Christianity" thesis of radicals like Michel de Certeau, the Jesuit philosopher, and Jean-Made Domenach, the former editor of Esprit...
...One, Don Gramont, Benedictine Abbot of Bee, simply didn't.want the job -- in part because there is so little tradition in the Frenel...
...Pope John Paul II did not yet know him well...
...Neither the cardinal nor his adversaries have permitted the classic antinomies -- Gallican/ ultramontane, progressive/conservative -- to divide them definitively...
...Lustiger's qualities and his inescapable position as l'outsider complet (the complete outsider) stand him.in excellent stead with the media, Rome, and the French government...
...In this enterprise no one else has played the role Lustiger has, but his leadership derives only in lesser part from his position as archbishop...
...He succeeded, but in doing so gave little direction to the church of France...
...Merri Church near the Paris city hall...
...From time to time the cardinal will still hector an editor for a particular article, but as it has become gradually clearer that he isn't going to "convert" these men and women -- many of them just as tough as he -- he has turned his back on them...
...He half admits he's made a mistake, but says defiantly, with a wave of the hand, "Well I won't be a prisoner of that little inbred world...
...As archbishop, Lustiger sees his first task as "spiritual conversion, not reform," a phrase that becomes clearer when he describes the second: "the deliberate reconciliation of French public opinion with Catholicism, not vice versa...
...and they pray -- a lot...
...True to character, Lustiger has been impatient in pursuing these goals when he has not been ruthless...
...It hid from proclaiming the Gospel...
...In the same mood, Cardinal Lustiger is quite liable to tell you that administering the archdiocese of Pads holds no appeal to him...
...the other goes into the road company of A Streetcar Named Desire rather than to the difficult but desirable Lab School at the University of Chicago...
...rather, he seems intense, convoluted, and intellectual, easily inclined to moodiness...
...he is, rather more assiduous in keeping his distance from the political right than from Mitterrand...
...Jeanne in 1978: Sermons d'un curd de Paris (Fayard...
...Few will blankly endorse the cardinal's policies and style, but almost none would agree with a Jesuit who told me that Lustiger represents "an archaic falling back on nineteenth-century formulas, a failure to come to grips with modernity...
...Lustiger himself is acutely aware of what he calls "the conservative admixture" in most "historical religious renewals...
...The sympathetic foreign observer has his own critique of Lustiger and the current spiritual renewal in Pads...
...He likes doing things himself...
...And in the French episcopacy (where the median age is over sixty) and secular clergy (where it's not much below), there is only a minority who have moved far enough away from the Catholicism of their youth to readily sympathize with the cardinal's approach...
...In theory, "the denial of reality is always a bad place to begin...
...Nor is it even the strength of his personality, for strength alone, as Paul Tillich noted in one of his finest sermons, is dangerous: "Strength without love destroys, first others, then itself...
...Unlike the characters in the backward-looking Biloxi Blues, those of Furth -- except perhaps for the son who, like Chicago-born Furth, goes off to be an actor -- seem the product of observation rather than theatrical stereotype...
...He associated his work at the Sorbonne closely with the French branch of the Pax Romana, a relatively ultramontane (or Roman) organization, rather than the Catholic Action's JEC (Catholic Student Movemen0...
...T HE CONFLICT between the archbishop of Paris and most French bishops stood out at the recent synod...
...Roger L. Shinn, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics Emeritus, Union Theological Seminar), $19.9.~ O Yale University Press Dept...
...Few have felt the lash of the angry Lustiger more squarely than Josd de Broucker, the lay editor-in-chief of La Vie (nde Catholique), yet amidst the flood of chapter-and-verse criticism he can cite, he too agrees that this archbishop "is one of the most remarkable men of our time" and that the church in Pads "is probably changing for the better...
...There's been debate in France (as elsewhere) over the dangers of" media-charisma...
...the old...
...These days scarcely 10 percent of French Catholics attend Mass (versus 25 percent in 1965), and the figures are much lower among workers...
...Bertoli, who recommended him to Rome for the prestigious see of Odtans which fell unexpectedly vacant in 1979...
...now it's 61 percent and falling...
...The mainspring of the cardinal's singularity is his Jewishness -- a term that does not apply merely to his ethnic origins or his former religion as, say, Anglicanism did for Newman or Manning...
...His early participation in the annual assemblies of the French bishops at Lourdes were marked by brooding reserve followed by blunt, explosive interventions...
...Finally, John Paul II categorically endorses Lustiger's policies in the church of France...
...My very weak recollection of Twigs (1971) is that it consisted of conventional sketches valuable only as a chance for Sada Thompson to show her ingenuity as a performer (and perhaps to indicate that she would eventually be ready for the high-toned schmaltz of television's Family...
...The Eglise de France has rediscovered not only its right to exist but to speak out...
...Riob6 turned more and more to mysticism and solitude, with the result that the diocese of Orl6ans had to run itself...
...In the second act, once again in control, she reveals that she has either acceded to or maneuvered the decisions by which the sons avoid the father's desire that they get the education he thinks they need to do better than he has done with his life...
...Not only are they of a piece, but the man -- his force of will, his differentness, his faith and personality -- is as much responsible as his actions for what has happened in the archdiocese and beyond since 1981...
...Qua bishop -- that is to say, as guardian of orthodoxy, father of his priests, protector of the flock -- he is less of a "natural" than as the herald and prophet that his personal brand of Judeo-Christianity calls him to be...
...The neo-orthodox imagination" confronts "the 'Word of God' in an empirically inaccessible realm...
...In social 'and economic matters, in policy toward the third world, and on the current question of the "[A] fine anthology" Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Up to this point, Bea appears as a comically querulous nag, catering to her husband and sons even as she abuses them...
...24~ o2A Yale Station New Haven, (TF o6~2o 25 April 1986:247immigrants in French society, Lustiger (like nearly all French bishops) stands closer, to the political left than to the right...
...In a nation so uniquely oriented to the capital as the French are, the metropolitan of Pads unquestionably holds the most watched job in the French church...
...The appointment came as a surprise to everyone, beginning with Lustiger himself...
...The fount of the man's faith and life is Judaism...
...he tended his flock, kept his mouth shut (only rarely making "social" or "political statements"), and tried to be uncontroversial...
...At the end of the first act, Fred and Bea have a wild and presumably characteristic fight in which Bea not only smashes dishes and rips her clothes, but turns over a heavy china cupboard...
...Eventually he broke step at one or two critical moments and blasted the prime minister, whom he publicly accused of "breaking his word...
Vol. 113 • April 1986 • No. 8
