France mourns mould breaking cardinal

FRANCE'S bishops, priests and lay people turned out in force this week to bid a final farewell to a cardinal who, after being silenced by Rome in the 1950s, later went on to become one of the major theological influences at Vatican II.
Cardinal Henri de Lubac, who was at 95 the world's oldest cardinal, died last week. Representatives of bishops' conferences around the world attended his funeral mass earlier this week, and the Pope said the church mourned "a great servant".
The cardinal was "in the best Catholic tradition in his meditatiOns on scripture, the church and the modern world," John Paul said in a telegram to France's Catholic head, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger.
Cardinal de Lubac, who lived in Paris and was a Jesuit, was one of the few cardinals who was not a bishop. When he was appointed to the College of Cardinals in 1983 he requested and received permission from the Pope to be exempt from the • rule requiring him to be made a bishop.
The cardinal's friends say this simplicity was a trademark of the Catholic scholar who symbolised the post-World War H theological revival in France. The revival was characterised by an effort to infuse Catholic thought into modern trends in the aftermath of the war's devastation.
"In all my work, my only ambition has always been and still is to make the great Christian tradition known and loved in order that contemporary thought may derive nourishment from it," he said after Vatican II.