Today is the feast of Edith Stein.
On a visit to Poland in 1985 I called on an Anglican pastor on the GDR Polish frontier near Breslau. We had morning coffee together and I can still remember how he told me that his State - The German Democratic Republic - was about to collapse.
At the time I thought he was out of touch. How wrong I was and how correct he was.
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As I am away from desk these days and have not the facility to log on to my blogspot, I am using this method to add something.
The following is the obit on Cardial Lustiger, which appeared in The Irish Times on Saturday. Well worth a read.
Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who was for 24 years the archbishop of Paris, and who was a close friend of the late pope John Paul II, has died of cancer in the Jeanne-Garnier hospice, of which he laid the first stone in 1994.
Lustiger's dual identity as a Jew who converted to Catholicism, but without ever renouncing his Jewish origins, made him a uniquely effective advocate of reconciliation between Jews and Christians. He kept the first name Aaron, after his grandfather who was a rabbi in Silesia, but added Jean-Marie when he was baptised in 1940.
Lustiger defined his own identity as: "Cardinal, Jew and son of immigrants." In 1981, a French newspaper published the headline: "John Paul II has appointed the new Archbishop of Paris; He is Jewish."
Before Lustiger's casket was taken into Notre Dame Cathedral for his funeral Mass yesterday, his cousin Arnaud recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, on the square outside.
The historian and academician Max Gallo described Lustiger as "the best disciple of the pope". Their complicity was based on "their Polish roots, strength of character and the same vision of Catholicism", he added.
The son of non-practising Polish immigrants, Aaron Lustiger was born in the 12th district of Paris in 1926. His parents, Charles and Gisèle, owned a dry-goods shop. When he was about 10, Aaron found a Bible on their bookshelf and read it from cover to cover. The New Testament seemed to him the completion of the Old. "I read the Bible with passion, and I said nothing to anyone," he later recounted.
The Lustigers tried to shelter Aaron and his sister Arlette from persecution during the war by sending them to hide with Suzanne Combes, a Catholic Frenchwoman in Orléans. It was there, on Good Friday in 1940, that Aaron "chose" Catholicism - a verb he preferred to "converted". He was baptised in Orléans that August. Though his parents judged his transformation "revolting", they hoped it would afford him a degree of protection. After the war, Lustiger's father attempted to have his baptism annulled.
In Paris, Nazi occupation forces demanded that Jews, including Lustiger's parents, wear the yellow star of David. Gisèle Lustiger was arrested in September 1942 and deported to the Auschwitz death camp, where she died in the gas chamber the following year. Some 30 members of Charles Lustiger's family also perished in the Holocaust.
Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, the perpetual secretary of the Académie Française, to which Lustiger was admitted in 1995, said she dared not ask him if he had a chance to reconcile with his mother before her deportation. Robert Serrou, Lustiger's biographer, said he never talked about his childhood, but "carried this suffering like a cross". Lustiger told Serrou he could not help thinking of his murdered mother every day.
As chaplain at the Sorbonne from 1954 until 1969, Lustiger rode around the Latin Quarter on a moped and wrote his sermons in smoke-filled cafes. During the May 1968 riots, he famously said, "There's no place for the Gospel in this bedlam." At the age of 43, Lustiger became parish priest at Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal in Paris's affluent 16th district. His reputation as a daring orator attracted rich Parisians. "If you go to Mass as you go to the service station, to fill the tank, you're wrong," he told them. "You are the petrol." John Paul II appointed Lustiger bishop of Orléans in 1979. His father sat in the front row for the ceremony, in the church where he'd been baptised 39 years earlier. He chose "Everything is possible for God" as his episcopal motto.
Describing his promotion to archbishop of Paris in 1981, Lustiger told Tribune juive newspaper: "For me, it was as if all of a sudden the crucifix wore a yellow star." The quote was widely criticised and misunderstood in the Jewish community.
In 1983, John Paul made Lustiger a cardinal. He continued to cling to his dual identity. In 1995, in Israel during a symposium on the silence of God during the Holocaust, Rabbi Ysrael Meir Lau accused him of "betraying his people and his religion" and said Lustiger embodied "the path of spiritual extinction which leads, like physical extermination, to the final solution of the Jewish question".
Yet Lustiger persisted in seeking reconciliation between Jews and Catholics. He earned the respect of the Jewish community for convincing the Carmelite nuns who had moved into Auschwitz to leave in 1994. That same year, he supported John Paul's controversial move to apologise for wrongs committed by the church, especially towards Jews. Three years later, he convinced French bishops to hold a ceremony of repentance at Drancy, the transit camp from which his mother and other French Jews were sent to the death camps.
In later years, Lustiger travelled repeatedly to New York to meet Orthodox Jewish leaders. Israel Singer, the president of the World Jewish Congress, visited him on his death bed.
In August 1997, Lustiger organised the World Youth Days, during which one million young people gathered on the race course at Longchamp to hear John Paul. A media-savvy cleric who founded Catholic radio and television stations, Lustiger scolded a star television presenter who congratulated him, saying, "Do you think young people are all obsessed with sex?"
Last May 31st, an emaciated Lustiger sat in a wheelchair beneath the portrait of cardinal Richelieu to bid farewell to the Académie Française. "You shall not see me again," he told his fellow 'immortals'. "I am sad for this, but I know I shall not cease thinking of you . . . Here, I was not very assiduous, but there where I shall be, I will be very present to look after the Académie. I assure you of my prayers, here and there."
President Nicolas Sarkozy broke off his holiday in the US to attend Lustiger's funeral Mass at Notre Dame yesterday. The cardinal was buried in the bishops' vault beneath the cathedral.
Aaron Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, born September 17th, 1926, died August 5th, 2007
The controversy whether or not a member of the seikh community in Ireland should be allowed wear the turban on duty as a member of the Garda Reserve Force is an interesting issue.
If the police force has a specific uniform then surely that's it, no debate. And people who give over-due attention to clothes, well, I get confused. Priests, who go around dressed in over-the-top clerical garb surely are making a statement, and an odd one, at least in my opinion. I keep thinking they have another 'agenda'.
Clothes oft proclaim the man.
Sometime ago I visited a person in a psychiatric hospital and it did strike me how clothes can make a statement.
We are al the time making statements.
For all those wondering what the estimable Michael Commane looks like, you can find out here (he's the younger man!): http://www.flickr.com/photos/blasketblue/1186128133/
Nick
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