[5] In October 1940, the Vichy regime passed the first of many anti-Semitic laws, which forced increasingly strict conditions on Jews in the unoccupied zone.

[2] Lustiger, his father, and sister sought refuge in unoccupied southern France, while his mother returned to Paris to run the family business.

For the next ten years, he was the director of Richelieu Centre, which trains university chaplains and counsels lay teachers and students of the grandes écoles, graduate schools such as the ÉNS-Fontenay-Saint-Cloud or the Ecole des Chartes.

[7] Lustiger received his episcopal consecration on 8 December 1979 from Cardinal François Marty, with Archbishop Eugène Ernoult of Sens and Bishop Daniel Pézeril serving as co-consecrators.

When installed as bishop, Lustiger avoided all reference to his liberal predecessor Guy-Marie Riobé, a pacifist closely allied to Catholic Action.

[1] Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Traditionalist Catholic group Society of Saint Pius X, criticized his nomination.

[7] Lustiger was considered a first-rate communicator and he was a personal friend of Jean Gélamur, head of the Catholic media group Bayard Presse.

[8][5] Lustiger deposed the vicars general Michel Guittet and Pierre Gervaise, had Georges Gilson transferred to Le Mans and Emile Marcus to Nantes, personally headed the meetings of the episcopal council, and made numerous other changes.

[7] In October 1981, the French bishops elected the more liberal Jean-Félix-Albert-Marie Vilnet as President of the Episcopal Conference, with whom Lustiger was on difficult terms throughout his life.

[7] In January 1983 he invited Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to Notre-Dame de Paris, where the latter criticized new catechisms proposed by a large part of the French clergy.

[7] He was incardinated Cardinal-Priest of Santi Marcellino e Pietro by Pope John Paul II in the consistory of 2 February 1983, at the same time as the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac.

In 1984, Lustiger led a mass rally at Versailles in opposition to the Savary Law, which reduced state aid to private (which was mostly Catholic) education.

This opposition cemented Lustiger's relations with the groups supporting private education, from whose midst he was to draw most of his candidates for the priesthood.

[7] Along with Cardinal Albert Decourtray, he strongly criticised Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, clashing with the liberal bishop Jacques Gaillot.

[7] During the celebrations of the second centenary of the French Revolution in 1989, he opposed Minister of Culture Jack Lang about the Pantheonization of the Abbé Grégoire, one of the first priests to take the oath on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

[10] He deposed the priest Alain Maillard de La Morandais from his diplomatic functions toward the political sphere, as he considered him to be too pro-Balladur during the 1995 presidential campaign.

Lustiger's search for dialogue with politicians led to his founding in 1992 of the Centre Pastoral d'Etudes politiques at St. Clotilde church in the 7th arrondissement, close to the hub of the French establishment.

Relations with the cultural sphere were promoted by a series of Lenten Sermons at Notre-Dame (into which dialogue with prominent French intellectuals and state-employed academics were introduced) and by plans for the opening of the Centre St. Bernard in the 5th arrondissement.

Lustiger was never elected as head of the Conférence des évêques de France (French Episcopal Conference) by his peers, with whom he was not popular.

In Le Choix de Dieu (The Choice of God, 1987), he declared that modern anti-Semitism was the product of the Enlightenment, whose philosophy he attacked.

[7] Lustiger, unlike other leading twentieth-century French bishops, did not draw noticeably on patristic writings and was more sensitive to rabbinic texts.

He was influential in the appointment of his moderate conciliar auxiliary Georges Gilson to the See of Le Mans, replacing senior clergy with men who shared similar views to his own.

He pursued ecumenism but also gave a critical address on Anglicanism when welcoming Archbishop Robert Runcie to Notre Dame.

[citation needed] In 1995, Lustiger played a key role in deposing the liberal bishop of Évreux, Jacques Gaillot, who was then transferred to the titular see of Partenia.

He supported the action of the parish priest of St. Bernard-de-la-Chapelle in accepting the protracted sit-in of a group of undocumented immigrants in 1996, but subsequently showed less sympathy to such activities.

He had a Polish background and staunchly upheld the Pope's conservative views in the face of much hostility from liberal Catholic opinion in France.

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, protested the award, saying it was "inappropriate" to honor Lustiger, who was born a Jew but left the faith.

[22] When Lustiger reached the age of 75 on 17 September 2001, he submitted his resignation as Archbishop of Paris to Pope John Paul II, as required by canon law.

Named 139th archbishop of Paris by His Holiness Pope John Paul II, I was enthroned in this Cathedral on 27 February 1981, And here I exercised my entire ministry.