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A funeral service including Jewish prayers has been held at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris for Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger                                                                                                                                                                          Cardinal Lustiger worked to improve Catholic-Jewish relations            The former Archbishop of Paris, who died on Sunday aged 80, was born Aaron Lustiger to Polish Jews who had settled in France before World War I. The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, interrupted his summer holiday in the United States to attend the funeral. Cardinal Lustiger became a Catholic at the start of World War II. The ceremonies at Notre Dame began with a reading of a Jewish psalm, followed by...

Sarkozy's trip to seal US entente By the time Nicolas Sarkozy arrives for his meeting on Saturday with President George W. Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, he will have travelled nearly 7,000 miles in two days. The French president's meeting at the Bush family's ocean-front compound was planned to coincide with his holiday 50 miles (80km) away at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. But he returned home Friday to attend the funeral of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris, who died last Sunday. He was scheduled to fly back across the Atlantic immediately after the multi-faith service in order to keep...

With intense thanks to a friend at the French desk for the translation, here is the La Croix account of this morning's funeral: Towards 10 a.m., the coffin, carried by six priests in violet stoles as ordered by Mgr Lustiger in 2004, arrived in the square, followed by procession of 50 bishops and 16 cardinals. According to the archbishop's palace, there were also 500 priests present. The ceremony began on the square of the cathedral, where over 2000 people had gathered under a gray sky, for the reading of the Jewish prayer for the dead, Kaddish. In homage to...

A sacred Jewish prayer read beneath the sculpted saints of Notre Dame Cathedral opened funeral proceedings Friday for Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, who was born Jewish and converted to Roman Catholicism as a boy.Lustiger, who lost his mother in the Holocaust and later devoted himself to healing the wounds between Catholics and Jews, had requested that his funeral include both faiths. He died Sunday at age 80 in a Paris hospice.Hundreds of people, including prominent Jewish leaders of France, Holocaust survivors and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, gathered to see Lustiger's coffin carried through the crowd and placed on...

Never mind the carbon footprint. Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s super-active president, will be crossing the Atlantic twice in the space of a day, to attend a funeral in Paris on Friday and still keep his Saturday lunch date with President Bush in Maine. (SNIP)Mr. Sarkozy is to arrive in Paris on a French government jet early Friday morning, a presidential spokesman said Thursday, for the 10 a.m. funeral of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the retired archbishop of Paris who died Sunday at 80, at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. He will then turn around and head back to the United States, the spokesman...

Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a convert from Judaism who sought to bring the faiths closer during his extraordinary life, is carrying on the mission in death — with a funeral rich in symbolism that includes a Jewish prayer read by a Nazi death camp survivor.Jews and Roman Catholic plan to join in front of the sculpted saints of the majestic Notre Dame Cathedral on Friday to hear the Jewish prayer, known as the Mourner's Kaddish, before the funeral Mass for the former archbishop of Paris."This was his wish, to share the remembrance this way," said Arno Lustiger, a cousin and 83-year-old...

PARIS: Never mind the carbon footprint. Nicolas Sarkozy, France's super-active president, is crossing the Atlantic twice in the space of a day to attend a funeral in Paris on Friday and still keep his Saturday lunch date in Maine with President George W. Bush. Sarkozy, whose decision to spend his summer break in the United States has raised eyebrows and some hackles here, has been vacationing for a week with his family at Lake Winnipesaukee in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. He was expected to arrive in Paris on a French government jet early Friday morning, in time for the funeral of...

PARIS — Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jew who converted to Catholicism and rose through church hierarchy to become one of the most influential Roman Catholic figures in France, died Sunday, the Paris archbishop's office said. He was 80. Lustiger _ whose Polish immigrant mother died in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz _ was archbishop of Paris for 24 years before stepping down in 2005 at the age of 78. He died in a hospice in Paris, the archbishop's office said. A cause of death was not immediately provided, but Lustiger had said in April that he was being treated...

Returning to things Lustiger, it's well after Roman noon, and still no sign from the Holy See of the customary papal telegram published at the death of every cardinal. The delay can best be attributed not to Benedict XVI's lack of something to say, but sewing up arrangements for the selection of his personal representative to Friday's funeral for the Parisian cardinal, who died yesterday at 80. (Given the timing in the midst of the August hiatus, finding an available cardinal becomes a bit more difficult than it usually is.... Even for the Pope.) Given Lustiger's stature as the...

One day Rabbi Rene-Samuel Sirat was invited to attend a lecture on the Holocaust, held in the amphitheater of the Sorbonne University in Paris. The speaker, a member of the Academie Francaise, moved the audience when he spoke of a Jewish girl who missed out on a golden opportunity to escape a concentration camp to remain near her parents. Eventually, she was sent to her death along with them. "Next to me sat Cardinal Lustiger," the former chief rabbi of France recalled. "I glanced at his face and saw tears running down his cheeks. At that moment I knew he...

CNA).- In a personally signed telegram, Pope Benedict XVI expressed his profound sorrow at the passion of Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger, Archbishop Emeritus of Paris, who he described as a man of faith and of dialogue. The Pope sent a message to Archbishop Andre Vingt-Trois, the current Archbishop of Paris, in which he expressed his “profound unity in prayer with the Archdiocese of Paris, with the members of his family and with all those affected by the disappearance of this grand figure of the Church in France.”The Holy Father entrusted “the beloved Cardinal Lustiger, who generously consecrated his life in...

Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, a Jew who converted to Catholicism and rose through church hierarchy to become one of the most influential Roman Catholic figures in France, died Sunday, the Paris archbishop's office said. He was 80. Lustiger - whose Polish immigrant mother died in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz - was archbishop of Paris for 24 years before stepping down in 2005 at the age of 78. He died in a medical center in Paris, the archbishop's office said. (snip) A funeral Mass for Lustiger was to be held Friday at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the Paris archbishop's...

In the early 1950s, or so IÂ’m told, two young men who would later come to world prominence attended some of the same political science lectures at the Sorbonne. One was the son of Polish-Jewish parents who had emigrated to France; the other was from Cambodia. One had lost his mother to the race-madness of German National Socialism; the other would himself be the cause of suffering for innumerable mothers. One had been converted to Catholicism as a young man; the other had followed a different messianic creed, Marxism. One would become the embodiment of a humanizing, reasonable faith; the...

Pope Benedict XVI marked the 40th anniversary of a landmark Vatican document on relations with Jews by calling Thursday for a renewed commitment for Catholics and Jews to deepen their bonds and work for the good of all humanity.Benedict issued a message that was read out during a commemoration of the "Nostra Aetate" document of the Second Vatican Council, in which the Catholic Church deplored anti-Semitism and repudiated the "deicide" charge that blamed Jews as a people for Christ's death.Rome's chief rabbi, Riccardo di Segni, told The Associated Press that he had refused to attend the ceremony because of the...

France was stunned when Pope John Paul II named Jewish-born Jean-Marie Lustiger as archbishop of Paris. "You are the fruit of the Holy Father's prayer," the pontiff's secretary told him. Could it be that the cardinal-electors will now stun the world by choosing Lustiger as next pope, the first Jew to occupy St. Peter's See since Peter himself? Lustiger, both whose parents died in Auschwitz, has always insisted that, though he had converted to Christianity at age 14, he was and remained a Jew: "I was born a Jew and so I am. For me, the vocation of Israel is...

Vatican, Feb. 09 (CWNews.com) - Archbishop André Vingt-Trois of Tours, France, will be named to succeed Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris, informed Vatican sources report. The nomination will be announced on February 11: the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. The selection of a prelate to replace Cardinal Lustiger-- who at 78 is well beyond the ordinary retirement age for a diocesan bishop-- has been the subject of heavy discussion at the Vatican for several months. On January 14, a special commission of Vatican officials met to choose his successor, but after failing to focus on a clear choice the...