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What an fascinating movie the life of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger could make. The Cardinal, who died on Sunday at the age of 80, was mourned at his funeral in Paris with both Jewish and Catholic prayers.

There’s your closing scene right there.

In Octogenarian’s account:

Lustiger, who was the archbishop of Paris until his retirement two years ago, was born to Polish Jewish immigrant parents in Paris. In 1940, after the German occupation of France, he was hidden with a Catholic family where he was exposed to and converted to Catholicism at age 13.

Two years later, his mother, who had objected to his conversion, was deported to a Nazi German concentration camp, where she died the following year. His father, who had also objected to Lustiger’s religious conversion, survived the Holocaust. When Lustiger was ordained a priest in 1954, his father sadly observed the ceremony from a seat far back in the church.

Just amazing.

In 1995, during to one of his visits to Israel, the chief Ashkenazi rabbi charged that Lustiger had “betrayed his people and his faith during the most difficult and darkest of periods” in the 1940s. The rabbi dismissed Lustiger’s claim that he had remained a Jew.

Lustiger responded: “To say that I am no longer a Jew is like denying my father and mother, my grandfathers and grandmothers. I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”

Read Octogenarian’s whole thing

Mr. Spielberg, are you listening?

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