Dare to believe.

Dare to Believe 

ORTHODOX CATHOLICISM is finding vital leaders these days, of whom Pope John Paul II is only one. The Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, is among the most remarkable. Born to Polish-Jewish parents in 1926, he converted to Catholicism in his teens and became a priest. Like the Pope, he has a warm, magnetic personality and has become a familiar media presence in Europe.

Dare to Believe is a collection of his homilies and interviews. In a short preface, he expresses his fear that his words, addressed to living audiences, will suffer in the transfer to cold print. But they turn out to be well worth reading and pondering. Cardinal Lustiger has an eloquence that comes from the depths.

If any general comment can be made about talks as disparate as those collected here, it is perhaps that Lustiger is less remarkable for his orthodoxy than for the sense of intimacy with God that he conveys. His Catholicism is not an ideology; his orthodoxy, firm as it is, has its foundation in the sense of mystery.

He cites Augustine's dictum that "If you understand it, it is not God." In the age of rationalism, he says, "one called 'God' all that could not be explained. One could say that this was the Western frontier that the Eastern states would conquer little by little, in a triumphant march of reason against God. And God was like an Indian, progressively pushed away to new and still unknown territories." But "God is not the frontier of meaning to our ignorance: God is the other before Whom we are and without Whom we are not."

He asserts: "Herein lies the originality of the Jewish and Christian traditions. The One of Whom it speaks is not counted with anything, anybody, not even with the most general and fundamental categories of the human mind."

Lustiger still considers himself a Jew, and though he was not raised to be religious, he deeply appreciates Christianity's Jewish roots, as when he discusses the Last Supper as a Passover ritual. He considers the Jewish tradition as the still-living context of Christianity, not as a vestige to be discarded. "The New Testament," he says, "is incomprehensible if it is not founded on the Jewish vocation, the vocation of Israel, the vocation of Christ to the pagans. This is a fundamental given of the Christian faith which embarrassed part of the West all through its history."

Lustiger sees the Marcionite heresy as part of the West's "constant drift . . . , the desire to cut off its own historical roots." He senses alienation behind much of the West's ostensible optimism, revealed in the "progressive" disposition to justify violence as a historical necessity. "Only the other day," he says, "someone was trying to explain the assassination of President Sadat by looking for the reasons which motivated the murderers. No one looks for the motivation behind the courage of innocent victims. It is always violence which people are trying to justify."

He respects the motives of progressive hopes as "noble," but he also notes the ironic and tragic paradoxes that attend them: "People thought that the power of human reason would be enough. And they discovered that everything can be turned upside down. Pacifist ideologies beget wars, theories about collective happiness bring the Gulag, liberalism enslaves the weak to the strong, the progress of science gives birth to the atomic bomb."

This has particular pertinence to Communism: "The Marxist-Leninist empires of the Eastern countries certainly represent the most far-flung enterprise of mastery over social life ever conceived. It is at least as great and ambitious as the will to master matter as Western society developed it." The idea of science has been taken out of the study and the laboratory and applied to "the transformation of reality and social life." But "when human reason wants to take over social life, its enterprise begets totalitarianism."

Lustiger notes that though we talk of archaic societies as closed societies, "our modern societies are far more terrifying: They are tremendously spellbinding and uniformizing. . . . We are going to reach 1984 without having really understood totalitarianism. The spell is so powerful that all these good folk don't see anything any more."

Still, he doesn't despair of modernity: "Atheism, however paradoxical it may seem, is the fruit of belief, not as its dialectical opposite, but as a trial of faith." He denies that France has been paganized; he insists that its cultural roots are still largely Christian, despite its current secularism. But in seeing hope for renewal, he says that this will require heroic efforts by Christians, since "Christianity cannot be received any more as a cultural given." He quotes Leon Bloy: "This Christian people does not live off its inheritance."

In his final homily, Lustiger honors St. Therese of Lisieux, savoring the contrast between heads of state he has known who felt powerless to influence events and the way "a frail and unknown young girl of 24 can, from her convent, influence the destiny of the world through the secret power of her love." This is a mind worth getting to know.