Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger

ON  CHRISTIANS 
AND  JEWS

2010

ISBN: 978-0-8091-4353-5

reviewed by Patrick Killough



(1) biblio.com 09/10/2011

Would you recommend this book to other readers?  Yes.   * * * * *

review:

He was born Aron Lustiger in 1926 in Paris, France. His parents were non-practicing Jews who had migrated from Poland. He died aged 80 battling bone and lung cancer in Paris in 2007. He was then called Aaron Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, from 1981 till retirement in 2005, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Paris.

Lustiger's 2010 book, ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS, is not an autobiography. But he draws often on his own life experiences: baptized in 1940 at age 13 as a Catholic; his mother's deportation to and death in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943; his ten years as student chaplain at the Sorbonne; after 1981 became a pioneer in French Catholic TV programs; he championed private religion-based schools under increasing pressure from the secularizing French government; and was elected member of the distinguished French Academy in 1995.

With Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Lustiger was one of the leading pro-Jewish spokesmen of the Catholic Church. The book ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS demonstrates his international prominence and how sought after he was as a speaker on Christian-Jewish relations.

ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS consists of seven speeches and one interview given by Cardinal Lustiger between 1982 and 2003. Two speeches were delivered to Jewish audiences in New York. The most far ranging of his remarks are embedded in a 1987 interview with Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton. The questions are learned and tough. And Lustiger does not dodge them.

The core of the Cardinal's several theses is that God has distinct missions for both Jews and Christians -- valid till the end of time. It is important that each confession understand and respect the other. Christians, especially Catholics, in the past 1500 or more years have been guilty of horrible crimes against Jews. This must stop. It is the will of God that Catholics consult Jews when examining their own Christian consciences.

The three page bibliography consists entirely of offerings in the same series that Cardinal Lustiger wrote for: "Studies in Judaism and Christianity: Explorations of Issues in the Contemporary Dialogue Between Christian and Jews." This series is supported by the Stimulus Foundation and the Paulist Fathers. ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS is rich in hope and insight.  -OOO-

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(2) lunch.com  09/11/2011

name of review:  "... it was as though the crucifix were wearing the yellow star"

rating: * * * *

review:

Readers most likely, I think, to benefit from this book are Roman Catholics seeking to deepen their insights into the Jewish roots of their historical form of Christianity. In ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS, Aron Jean-Marie, Lustiger (1926 - 2007), Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, presents his personal yet orthodox interpretation of relations between Judaism and Christianity and prays that it will replace earlier, more anti-Jewish interpretations heard from prominent Catholics well into the 1940s.
 
Lustiger was born and raised in Paris by practicing but anti-clerical Polish Jewish parents. He was attracted to Catholicism by wide reading (including the entire Scriptures in a Protestant translation) and was baptized at age 14 in 1940.

His mother and many other relatives were immolated by Nazis. He was named bishop of Orleans by Pope John Paul II in 1979. Of that time Lustiger said:

"My nomination as bishop meant for me that all of a sudden it was as though the crucifix were wearing the yellow star" (Ch. 1, p. 32).

Two years later Lustiger was made Archbishop of Paris and in 1983 a Cardinal.
 
ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS appeared in 2010, being an English translation of two press interviews and six addresses given between 1982 and 2003 on the themes of Jews, Judaism, the State of Israel, Christianity as the wild olive cutting grafted onto the cultivated olive tree of Israel and several related topics.

All eight chapters are meaty and full of insights. There are also End Notes and a somewhat unusual bibliography selected by the publisher, not by the Cardinal himself. All titles therein are Stimulus Books prepared for the Stimulus Foundation related to the Paulist Press. That Foundation supports scholarly works on important Jewish and Christian topics and especially on the interrelations between and interactions of the two confessions.
 
Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger was elected to the prestigious French Academy and was a gifted, lucid communicator. He is even better, I think, in his two oral interviews than in his six prepared talks delivered in New York and elsewhere.
 
For that reason, if you have time for only one chapter, I recommend the first, "Well, If I Must," originally published in Hebrew in January 1982. The Cardinal still felt new in his job as Archbishop of Paris but was skilfully drawn out by his two Israeli journalist interlocutors to review his entire life both as Jew and as Catholic and to justify his conversion  Here are some excerpts -- with question (Q) shortened or parphrased; Lustiger's answer (A) is in quotation marks:
 
 -- (Q): How do you see Jews?

    (A): "God made them into a people of his gift and it was not for their sake but for the sake of the whole world."
 
-- (Q): In what sense are you both Christian and Jewish?

      (A) "... in becoming a Christian, I did not intend to cease being the Jew I was then. I was not running away from the Jewish condition. I have that from my parents, and I can never lose it. I have it from God, and he will never let me lose it. ... (Christianity was for me) a better way of being Jewish. ... as if carried in the womb of the first one."
 
-- (Q): How should Christians and Jews act toward one another?

    (A): "... there should be on both sides gratitude and mutual recognition. ... it is now possible, perhaps, for Judaism to recognize Christianity as an offspring of God."
 
And the interview goes on to cover other turning points in Lustiger's life, why Catholics accept Jesus as the Messiah not just of Israel but of pagans also, the archbishop's prayer life, his meetings with French Jewish leaders, the Shoah, and "the moral obligation toward the Jewish people" of the Catholic church.
 
In his 3-page "Introduction" penned in 2006 American Cardinal Avery Dulles (son of Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles) in brief compass identifies a dozen important themes touched on by Cardinal Lustiger. This book gives Christians, especially Roman Catholics, and Jews alike much to think about, including helpful suggestions as to how to draw nearer to "the other" without treachery to one's own group.
 
-OOO-

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(3) bn.com 09/12/2011

title of review: Is Christianity "Judaism for the pagans?"

rating: * * * *

review:

ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS (2010) provides English translations of two spontaneous oral interviews and six prepared speeches between 1982 and 2003 of Cardinal Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger, first the Bishop of Orleans, then Archbishop of Paris. Each of the six speeches, in my opinion, ranges from 3+ to 4 Stars in stylistic and substantive value for their probing past, present and future of Christian-Jewish interactions. But the two interviews merit 5 Stars by comparison! One lesson is that magic can take place when four tough interviewers in two separate encounters strike fire from a brilliant communicator and deep thinker like Cardinal Lustiger.

Barnes and Noble reviews have severe limitations on their length. So I will review only one of the eight chapters of ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS. It is Chapter 3, "Judaism and Christianity," a 1987 interview of Cardinal Lustiger by Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton. Missika, a "media sociologist," has been Deputy-Mayor of Paris. Wolton has published extensively on inter-relations of culture, society and politics. Both came to their interview of the Cardinal with impressive knowledge of history, ready to spring like bear traps. But Lustiger was even better prepared. Some highlights and excerpts follow.

(1) Lustiger reminded that in early days "Christians" meant literally "Messianics," Jews and others who believed that the Messiah of Israel had appeared and that his name was Jesus of Nazareth.

(2) Rationalists are forever offended that the Absolute manifests Himself in contingent historical events: e. g., birth of the King of the Jews in Bethlehem; his condemnation to death on a cross by Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, etc. Jesus refuses to become "a cultural Apollo," tempting Christianity to project onto the Messiah its "own image of man, an image that it finds pleasing."

(3) The Messiah "was expected by God's people and was to be recognized by them."

(4) "Throughout the first century, Christianity was a Jewish affair." The anti-Judaism of early Church Fathers like St John Chrysostom was a quarrel among inheritors of the same promise to Abraham, a family quarrel. The Fathers' anti-Judaism was not the atheistic anti-semitism of MEIN KAMPF in which anti-Christians rejected Jews' very right to exist.

(5)  And yet "Nazism was born among people who had been baptized."

(6) "... the institutional opposition to Jews began with Constantine."

(7) What is the meaning of Judaism's continuing presence today? Answer: "The Jewish people exist because God has chosen them ... for the purpose of saving all mankind. But election is not so much a privilege as a mission."

(8) The continuing existence of Israel "is a guarantee of the Parousia's coming" (i.e. of the final return of the Messiah).

(9) "It is true that Christianity is Judaism for the pagans, in the sense that, for the Christian, it is in Christ that Judaism receives its plenitude and recompense by making God accessible to pagans."

On and on this interview goes, with very tough questioning which will not be denied full answers by Cardinal Lustiger. If you like Chapter Three, you still have seven more chapters to go: dense, deep, subtle, drenched in thousands of years of history. -OOO-

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(4) amazon.com  09/13/2011

title of review:  How Can and Must Jews and Christians Work Together?

rating: * * * * *

review:

Odds are good that you must be a brilliant, lucid, original thinker if your distinguished French peers have elected you a member of the French Academy. And all that is true of Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger, born Jewish, who read his way in 1940 into baptized Christianity at age 14, who was later appointed Bishop of Orleans, then Archbishop of Paris and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.

With such expectations I opened and read with high hopes the 2010 translation of two interviews and six addresses by Lustiger called ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS. And the more often I return to this book, the higher grows my regard for it. It has eight chapters, composed between 1982 and 2003, covering Lustiger's evolving views on Christians and Jews (he died of cancer at age 80 in 2007).

In my opinion, Jean-Marie Lustiger is his nimble, profound, fearless best in chapters one and three: i. e., two oral interviews (1982, 1987) with a total of four hard-hitting interlocutors. They force Lustiger to be concrete and to the point, their point -- which is often biographical and painfully specific!

In the six formal written addresses, by contrast, the Cardinal too often soars without being restrained into Plato's abstract "pure heaven of Ideas." I will in this review focus on Chapter eight to make my case. This was a 2003 address in New York to the World Jewish Congress. It is entitled: "Where Jews and Christians Work Together." It might more accurately be styled: "Six Selected Very General Areas where Jews and Christians must work together because they are now finally in a position to do so."

Speaking to the World Jewish Conference February 10, 2003, Cardinal Lustiger noted improvement in inter-faith love since the Second World War, including the Second Vatican Council's rethinking of past injuries by Catholics to Jews and how to correct them; the 1986 visit by Pope John Paul II to the Great Synagogue of Rome; the Pontiff's prayer at Jersusalem's Western Wall in 2000 and more.

"The past has not been forgotten, the suffering has not been erased, the differences cannot be wiped away, and the sometimes radical disagreements cannot be obliterated." But now at long last Christians and Jews have "real dialogue, real explorations, and real discoveries."

Much of the progress has, however, been unplanned, face to face or via small groups on small matters.

Now, Lustiger argues, it is finally possible for both sides to lift their sights to at least six universal issues confronting Jews and Christians by that elusive thing called "Modernity." 

"People can love each other better when they are looking in the same direction than when they watch each other."

The six issues that Cardinal Lustiger says that Christians and Jews are now at last positioned to look at and act towards together are:
--(1) Human dignity, human rights, religious freedom and tolerance.

--(2) Ethical and moral questions. Together we can confront a world surprised to find that "scientific rationality would (not) automatically guarantee moral improvement." Together we can offer God-rooted natural law as an ancient alternative to situational and other ethics.

--(3) Politics. Power. We know man's destiny from the Bible. We have true perspective.

--(4) Modern rational criticism. Both our confessions have been attacked in modern times by the likes of Voltaire, Diderot and Hegel. Jews have faced the additional challenge of assimilating into European Christian cultures already slipping their moorings and moving into secularism.

--(5) Scholarly religious encounters, "a novel, often dramatically pressing, challenge." Jews are uniquely selected by God for a universal mission via "the call and blessing addressed to Abraham." Christians and Jews have both produced thinkers who studied the other side's giants. Think of Hannah Arendt's study of Augustine. This is a huge area for "looking in the same direction." Read each other's books! Especially about God's covenants with Adam and Noah. We have many theoretical starting points for joint Jewish-Christian investigation.

--(6) What existing, concrete Jewish and Christian communities either promote or impede joint Jewish-Christian action? A homogeneous Christendom, with imperial or national unities of people, church and state, is no more. Western Europe and North America are now characterized by pluralistic, liberal, democratic political structures. Within modern tendencies "what is the most coherent strategy for the practice of Jewish life and Christian faithfulness?" Among Christians, homogeneous groups like Amish-Mennonites are the exception. The influence of the clergy is less, that of the laity is rising. A year earlier (2002) the Cardinal had visited several particularistic, homogeneous Jewish groups in Manhattan. They were coping well on their own selective terms with contemporary secular life in the USA.

The Cardinal calls for a project asking questions of and investigating together Jewish and Christian "life-styles," contemporary cultures trying to make their faiths relevant to modernity, to universal rationalizing and to secularization and assimilation. Would both sides not then better understand "the relationship between faith and human existence in its daily, practical realities?"

Finally, we Jews and Christians need to do less watching of each other and more looking in the same direction at the above six issues and others. If we did, then

"everyone might come to understand himself better, and all might then become able to ask more forcefully the questions that are vital today for the future of humankind."

ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS is introduced and its contents highlighted by American Jesuit Cardinal Avery Dulles. It has a critical Afterword by Rabbi Alan Brill, a professor in the department of Jewish-Christian studies at Catholc Seton Hall University. The book has brief End Notes on its eight chapters and concludes with a list of Paulist Press publications of scholarly works on Jewish-Christian relations.

My bottom line is that ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS is a valuable, thoughtful historical narrative and analysis by a renowned Catholic prelate who personally considered himself both Jewish and Christian. If there is an unfamiliar element to his presentation it is, perhaps, that he was also thoroughly French. I do not read many French authors and working my way into their rationalist thought processes is not easy. But in this instance it is worth while.  -OOO-

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(5) epinions.com 09/14/2011

Title of Review: Christians and Jews do well to look together in the same direction.

Rating: * * * * *

Review:

Aron Lustiger was born to Polish Jewish parents in Paris in 1926. He died there of cancer in 2007, a Roman Catholic Cardinal, member of the French Academy, and retired Archbishop of Paris. With his upset parents' permission, he had been baptized in 1940 at age 14 as Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger

Lustiger's book, ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS, contains, especially in Chapter one (of eight), important biographical information. But it is not autobiography. It is history, theology, natural law and speculative reason at its best. The book presents understandable English translations of two oral interviews (1982, 1987) and six written-for-delivery addresses to various groups (1985 - 2003). All eight were originally in French. 

In his final chapter, Cardinal Lustiger suggests six areas for present and future Jewish-Christian joint or parallel actions. The final of the six themes suggested is to probe together in scholarly fashion representative Jewish and Catholic lifestyles, if such there be. 

Curiously, there is one difference in lifestyles and values for living that never comes up, not even in the two wide-ranging, hard hitting interviews by two highly qualified Israeli and two French interlocutors. That difference relates to the roles alloted to celibacy versus marriage. Both Jews and Christians preach chastity and the impermissibility of sexual relations outside monogamous marriage. But Christians, especially Catholics and Orthodox, also emphasize virtues uniquely inherent in life styles of long-term or even perpetual sexual abstinence, mainly for monks, nuns and clergy but also for vowed lay persons. A curious omission. This is one area that I personally would love to see Catholic and Jewish literati, theologians and social scientists take up.

Like Saint Edith Stein (1891 - 1942) Cardinal Lustiger (1926 - 2007) is one of the 20th Century's famous Roman Catholics who had been born into Jewish families, converted to Christianity yet always stubbornly insisted on their remaining true Jews. 

Hitler would agree with both of them: Stein and her sister Rosa, though Carmelite nuns, were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1942, the same month that Lustiger's mother was whisked away to the same place, though she did not die until the following year.

Rabbis disagreed: Jews who became Christians were apostates, not to be compared with honest simple goyim ("the nations"). Christian converts were traitors to Judaism. 

The subject of Jewish identity and whether Christians can be Jews is strongly probed in the first chapter of ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS, one of two first-class jobs of interviewing in the book (the other is Chapter Three). Lustiger defends the Pauline metaphor that Christians (originally meaning "Messianics") are wild olive cuttings grafted onto the cultivated vine of Israel. 

The Church's essential unity with Israel and its Scriptures was settled by the 2nd Century excommunication of Bishop Marcion of Sinope, who argued that the Old Testament preached one God, while the New Testament, Jesus and Saint Paul proclaimed an entirely different God.

Fifth Century Church Father Saint John Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople, forbade Christians to consult Jewish rabbis. His attitude, though regretable, was anti-Judaism, not anti-Semitism, argues Lustiger. Chrysostom and the rabbis were engaging in a heated family quarrel: who were the true heirs of Zion? 

Post-Enlightenment anti-Semitism of Hitler and others was, by contrast, a total and diabolical rejection of Jews as a people. Catholic theologians see anti-Semitism as totally un-Christian, indeed anti-Christian.

The six prepared-in-advance speech texts are as meaty as the two oral interviews, but do not display as well Cardinal Lustiger's nimbleness and skills as both debater and a dialog partner in search of important truths.

Other topics tackled in ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS include

the suffering Messiah of Isaiah and whether he has come once already as Jesus of Nazareth, later to return in glory;

the theological significance of the continued existence of Jews (it is God's will that they witness his word till the end of time)

and the re-creation of the state of Israel.

Also: why God allowed the Shoah/Holocaust;

what the second Vatican Council and especially Pope John Paul II have done to change widespread popular Catholic negative thinking about Jews;

the duty of Catholics to listen respectfully to Jewish fears and criticisms;

the tragic disappearance before the time of Constantine of the pure Jewish Church of Jerusalem and more.

Chapter eight (an address to the 2003 World Jewish Congress in New York) asserts that so much has improved since World War II in Christian-Jewish interactions that it is now high time for both sides to move ahead, to go beyond one-on-one, face-to-face, small group discussions and cooperation. 

Both sides should henceforth spend less time keeping a wary eye on the other (why was a Carmel started outside Auschwitz? why does a State of Israel exist? In canonizing Edith Stein, was the Vatican laying the ground for re-constitution of a Jewish ritual group or Rite within Catholicism, etc.?). 

Christians and Jews can and should, beginning here and now, best display their newly won respect and even love for one other by consciously looking together not at "the other side" but "in the same direction" at major world problems facing both and to which they each bring either identical or complementary positive contributions for the good of all mankind. 

Jews and Christians can work either together as a team or in parallel but separate initiatives to clarify and propagate true views of human rights and freedom of conscience, of ethics, politics, to answer attacks on theism by rationalists, secularists and  modernists, also to study each other's great thinkers (as Jewish Hannah Arendt did with Saint Augustine), and, finally, to research and probe functional and dysfunctional elements in each other's cultures and life styles. Here, the Cardinal wobbles a tad and loses some of his habitual clarity!

The late Avery Dulles, born Presbyterian son of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, American Jesuit theologian and Cardinal, introduces the Lustiger collection. Jewish scholar Rabbi Alan Britt provides a critical Afterword. ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS concludes with End Notes and a three page Bibliography of all other scholarly works in a series of Stimulus Books. These books are the outcome of research on Jewish and Christian topics funded by The Stimulus Foundation and published by the Paulist Press.

All in all, ON CHRISTIANS AND JEWS is astonishly good and informative in its two interviews. The six prepared speech texts, by comparison, are a bit stiffer and more cautious, less free-wheeling and autobiographic, more monographic, but nonetheless clearly stated, at times profound and also in places very abstract and demanding of readers. Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger remains at virtually every moment a thoroughly French thinker of clear and distinct ideas in the mould of Rene Descartes.

-OOO-

Pros:
Important topic: rebuilding Jewish-Christian relations.

Profound answers to hard questioning in two interviews.

Cons:
Prepared speeches more abstract than the two interviews.

French Catholic viewpoints perhaps unfamiliar.

The Bottom Line:

Roman Catholic effort to rethink reasons behind centuries of Christian-Jewish hatreds, clashes and wrongs. Improvements in relations.

Suggested future joint actions.
 
Deeply theological, at times abstract.


Recommended: Yes!
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