Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger

A Jewish convert to Christianity, he went on to become Archbishop of Paris

In the complex relationship between Catholicism and Judaism in 20th-century France, there can be no more remarkable career than that of Jean-Marie Lustiger, who has died of cancer aged 80. Born Aaron Lustiger, to a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he rose to the summit of the French Catholic hierarchy, ending his career as Cardinal Archbishop of Paris. At one time he was even mentioned as a possible successor to Pope John Paul II.

Lustiger was born in Paris. One of his grandparents had been a rabbi in Poland, but his Polish-born parents were not practising Jews. Before the Germans occupied Paris in June 1940, the family left for Orléans. It was here, in the summer of 1940, that he converted to Catholicism - he was baptised on August 21. In this period it was not unprecedented for Jewish parents to place their children with Catholic families, and accept a tactical conversion, in the hope of protecting them from persecution. But this was not Lustiger's case. His conversion occurred, it seems, despite his parents' opposition.

In 1942, his mother was deported to Auschwitz, where she perished. Lustiger, his father and sister somehow escaped arrest. After the war, he studied at the Sorbonne and the Catholic Institute of Paris. He was ordained to the priesthood in April 1954. From 1954 to 1969 he was a chaplain at the Sorbonne, and from 1969 a parish priest in the bourgeois 16th arrondissement of Paris, a different experience from having been in the heart of the Latin Quarter during the events of 1968. He was as surprised as anyone when he found himself appointed Bishop of Orléans in 1979, since he had few obvious patrons in the French hierarchy. The sudden elevation was certainly a calculated decision by John Paul II, whose choice was probably less dictated by their shared Polish origins than by a desire to make a statement about Catholic-Jewish relations.

Lustiger was a charismatic figure, a great communicator with no pomposity. As chaplain he was well known for travelling round Paris on his motot-scooter. As Archbishop of Paris he founded a Catholic radio station, Radio Notre Dame. But his veneer of modernity disguised a determined and authoritarian temperament, and he was totally committed to John Paul's conservative moral agenda. He supported the deposition, in 1995, of the liberal Bishop of Evreux, Jacques Gaillot, who had expressed heterodox opinions on such issues as homosexuality, abortion and clerical celibacy. In 1984, Lustiger was in the forefront of the opposition to President François Mitterrand's attempt to reduce state aid to private schools.

Lustiger will, however, be remembered above all for his role, symbolised by his very person, in continuing the reconciliation between Catholics and Jews which had been started by the Vatican Council in the 1960s. Given the appalling record of the Catholic hierarchy in France during the Nazi occupation (redeemed only by the action of some individual Catholic prelates) this was a fraught issue.

Initially, Lustiger annoyed many Jews when, on his appointment to the diocese of Orléans, he remarked that it was as if "the crucifix had suddenly begun to wear a yellow star". Conservative Catholics, on the other hand, were suspicious of him for his origins. He came to perform his role of reconciliation with delicacy and tact. He was one of the moving spirits behind the French church's official "repentance", in September 1997, of its wartime role. He visited Auschwitz on two occasions: first in June 1983, and again as representative of the Pope for the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation in January 2005.

In the intervening period he played a key role in resolving the crisis caused by the installation of a Carmelite nunnery at Auschwitz in 1984, helping to persuade the Pope to order its removal in 1993. He was an outspoken critic of the racist ideas of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Lustiger always said that in becoming a Catholic he had never ceased to be a Jew, and that his conversion was in some sense a completion of his Judaism, as the New Testament was the completion of the Old. By the end of his life, he had succeeded in winning the respect of both the French-Jewish community and of most French Catholics as well. He stepped down as archbishop in 2005, but participated in the election of Pope Benedict in the same year. Earlier this year, he had announced that he was suffering from a grave illness, and in May, frail and emaciated, he made an emotional appearance before the Académie Française to bid his fellow "immortals" farewell.

At his request, a marble plaque inside Notre Dame cathedral will bear the inscription: "I was born a Jew. I received the name of my paternal grandfather Aaron. Christian by faith and by baptism, I remained a Jew, as did the Apostles."

· Jean-Marie Lustiger, priest, born September 17 1926; died August 5 2007