A necessary tribute

When French Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger passed away recently, the Church lost a great servant and leader. He seems to have been of a different era, but…some things never change. This remembrance George Weigel did on Cardinal Lustiger points them out.

To meet Jean-Marie Lustiger was to meet a man of God: He was a wonderful human being — intelligent, caring, funny in a wry way — because he had been transformed by the power of God, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit. His great desire was that others might share in the gift that he had been given, the gift of faith. That gift led him to read situations in their true depth, often against the grain of the conventional wisdom. And this was another quality he shared with the late John Paul II — the quality of reading the dynamics of history in depth. Like the man who took a great risk in appointing him archbishop of Paris, Lustiger (who took no less a risk in accepting John Paul’s appointment) understood that the most dynamic force in history over time is neither politics nor economics but rather culture: what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; what men and women are willing to stake their lives on.

We need to understand that, the dynamic force of the culture and how we shape it.

And at the heart of culture, Lustiger knew, is cult: the act of worship. Everyone worships; the only question is whether the object of our worship is worthy. Jean-Marie Lustiger lived, led, and died in the conviction that the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus is true worship, worship that can shape a truly liberating humanism. That is why everyone whose life he touched was the richer for the encounter.