Paris Prelate Recalls Jewish Upbringing : Cardinal Tells His Story in New Book

Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris, says his parents, Polish Jews, were devastated when he decided to convert to Roman Catholicism at the age of 14.

“It was the most painful thing that could happen to them,” Lustiger, 61, said in “Le Choix de Dieu” (“The Choice of God”), a book culled from 65 hours of interviews with two French writers.

“I was acutely aware of causing them intolerable pain. It tore me apart and I did it only because it was an inner necessity,” he said.

Until now, Lustiger has said little of his past as young Aron Lustiger, grandson of a Polish rabbi and son of Jewish shopkeepers who immigrated to France in 1918.

He recalls “feeling different” from his classmates and told how he was once beaten up in Paris’ Luxembourg gardens “simply because I was Jewish.”

The book, published in December by Editions de Fallois, may end years of speculation about Lustiger’s childhood, his decision to convert, his teen-age years in hiding during the war and his spectacular rise in the French Catholic Church, commuting to Rome for private talks with Pope John Paul II.

‘Hate Role of Convert’

“I hate playing the role of the convert who’s going to tell his personal story,” Lustiger said. “ . . . It was a trial, when I was named bishop, to have to talk about myself. I have never hidden what I am, but I have never wanted it to be a subject of conversation.”

He told interviewers Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton that he considers Christianity a natural extension of Judaism and never felt he was renouncing his origins or his faith.

Asked why he chose to seek the answers to his spiritual dilemma in Catholicism rather in Judaism, he said:

“Christianity is the fruit of Judaism. To be more clear, I believed in Christ, the messiah of Israel. Something that I had carried within me for years crystallized.”

Elie Weisel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, wrote in the newspaper Le Monde that the Jewish people lost in Lustiger a man who “surely would have contributed to their grandeur and fulfillment of their glory.”

“Cardinal Lustiger . . . is convinced he did not leave his people. . . . For me, I maintain that for a Jew, salvation is possible only within his Jewishness,” Wiesel wrote.

‘Disturbs Catholics’

In an interview, author Missika said, “Lustiger disturbs . . . practicing Catholics and religious Jews alike. By calling Judaism the ‘source’ or the ‘roots’ of Christianity, he develops a personal philosophy for reconciling two different religions.”

Lustiger did not see the questions before the interviews, but requested the right to rewrite answers before final publication.

Like most Jewish immigrants between the wars, Lustiger’s parents were eager for their children to integrate into French society. They were not religious, but the mother said blessings in the home and the father explained Jewish customs and holidays to Aron and his younger sister, who also later converted to Catholicism.

“The Judaism of my childhood was a sensitivity, a way of life, a social world, folklore and recipes for borscht and matzo. . . . We knew the dietary laws even though we didn’t follow them,” Lustiger told his interviewers.

Lustiger discovered the Christian world on two trips to Germany where his father sent him to learn the language. Later, in 1940, when he was 14 years old, he found his way into the cathedral in Orleans, France.

Extended Visit

“I stopped before the southern transept in front of an orderly mass of flowers and lights. I stayed a long time. I didn’t know why I was there, nor why these things were happening inside me. I didn’t understand the significance of what I was seeing,” he said.

He said he returned the next day and was overwhelmed by a feeling of spiritual emptiness. “That’s when I thought, I want to be baptized,” he said.

His parents were unconsolable--”To them, it was something completely incomprehensible, crazy and unbearable.”

His mother, who was deported from France in 1942, died in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in Poland.

In 1946, when Lustiger entered the seminary to study for the priesthood, his father cut off his allowance and the two had no contact for two years.

Lustiger was ordained in 1954. Until 1969 his parish was the Sorbonne. After a short stint in a Parisian neighborhood church, Lustiger, as bishop, returned to Orleans and the same church in which he was baptized nearly 40 years earlier.

In 1981, John Paul named him archbishop of Paris and, in 1983, he was named a cardinal.