On August 5, France not only lost a noble citizen of great stature, but, together with the Catholic Church, lost a prelate who, as Archbishop of Paris for 25 years, performed his challenging mission for the people of God in France, and also overseas, to evangelise the faithful, and humankind according to the needs and the culture of modern times.

This great bishop was Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who was also an adviser to John Paul II. As Archbishop of Paris, the Cardinal led France's 45 million Catholics for a quarter century until his retirement in 2005.

One was pleased to listen to President Nicolas Sarkozy's statement as soon as he was informed of Cardinal Lustiger's death: "In the course of phone conversations that I had with Jean-Marie Lustiger in the last weeks, I found a man of great courage, lucid about his condition (he was ill for some months), but full of the hope of soon meeting Him to whom he had consecrated his life".

Aaron Lustiger was born in Paris on September 17, 1926; his parents had met in Paris after moving to France from Poland after World War I. After the German occupation of France in 1940, at the age of 13, against the wishes of his parents, he decided to convert from the Jewish faith to Catholicism. He was baptised in August 1940, adding the name of Jean-Marie to Aaron.

His mother was deported from France and died in Auschwitz in 1943.

After studying literature, philosophy and theology at the Sorbonne, Jean-Marie Lustiger was ordained priest in 1954 and served as a chaplain to Catholic students and inquiring non-believers at his alma mater for 15 years. Throughout his apostolate with students and the elderly he continued to attract notice and his homilies drew large congregations of intellectuals.

When, in 1979, Cardinal Francois Marty of Paris began to prepare for his succession, asking the priests of the archdiocese to send him memoranda on the qualities required in a new bishop, Lustiger prepared a lengthy, unsparing report on the state of French Catholicism, and laid out the strategy he and his friends thought necessary to deal with it.

According to this analysis, the Church in France, prior to the French Revolution, had been a "Church of power" allied to the political order.

He stressed that the Church must abandon the pretence of power, refuse alliances with any political force, and evangelise France, not through the mediation of politics, but through the conversion of culture. This meant taking the Gospel straight to the moulders and shapers of French high culture, the thoroughly secularised intelligentsia. The hardest cases should be put first and France should be converted from the head down. (Chosen by God - Conversations with Jean-Marie Lustiger).

Lustiger later described his memorandum as "very, very radical". In fact it showed striking parallels to John Paul II's "culture first" understanding of history.

Whether by sheer coincidence or by good judgment, Lustiger was appointed Bishop of Orleans in November 1979. A few months later, Pope John Paul II had to name the new Archbishop of Paris.

This was an appointment of crucial importance. As George Weigel says in his Witness to Hope, "John Paul dealt with this crucial appointment on his knees, in the Chapel in the Papal apartment". Finally, the decision was clear. Bishop Lustiger, informed of his appointment was aghast. He thought the Pope was taking an enormous risk and asking him to do the same... Three times Lustiger was told by Pope's secretary, "You are the fruit of the prayer of the Pope".

Assisted by divine inspiration, he finally accepted this very crucial appointment, and proved to be an endless reformer.

He forced it all squarely, began a systematic canvass of the Paris clergy in some 62-hour meetings, and then got on with the job of re-evangelising France from the head down, preaching every Sunday night to intellectuals and students in Notre Dame Cathedral and writing a series of popular books.

His message was ever so clear: "The Church is not a 'Church of power', but a Church of the Gospel, whose witness text compelled a defence of the rights of man".