The ‘Jewish cardinal’? Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger (1926–2007)

Abstract

Cardinal Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger died at the age of 80 in 2007. Archbishop of Paris from 1981 to 2005, he was a towering and controversial public figure, both within the Catholic church and in European society more broadly. Since his death, he has remained a subject of intense interest. This essay will analyse two films about him – the 2012 documentary Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger (Jean-Yves Fischbach) and the 2013 fiction film Le Métis de Dieu (Ilan Duran Cohen) – as prisms through which the thought, policies and achievements of Lustiger can be examined and assessed. Primarily a charismatic man of faith, Lustiger was also widely engaged with the history of his times. It will be argued that his personal trajectory, frequently through his own direct agency, offers insight into several crucial layers of the cultural and political history of France, including the Occupation years; the Jewish question; the post-war recovery and decolonisation processes; Franco-German reconciliation; the restructuring of the universities; the chaotic socio-political movements around 1968; the development of the European Union; and the complex transformations of church life since the Second Vatican Council with the concomitant shifts in the relations between church and state.