World War II Conversion Story: “I do not care what you suffered for me on that Cross.”

From Fr. Haggerty’s book, Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into an Essential Encounter with God

Shortly after World War II, in Paris, a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy who had survived the German occupation while losing his parents to the concentration camps entered the Cathedral of Notre Dame along with two Catholic friends of the same age.

They were in a mischievous mood, and the two Catholic boys dared the Jewish boy to enter the confessional and pretend to make a confession to the priest. They wrote down some necessary words and gave him a quick instruction on the usual procedure.

The Jewish boy took up the challenge and disappeared into the confessional. Apparently he lacked sufficient dramatic skills to fool the priest, who presumably did not give him the Church’s sacramental absolution.

Nonetheless, at the end of the confession, the priest did give him a penance. He was told to walk across the cathedral to the adjacent far side, and there he would find a very large crucifix and a man nailed to it. There he was to kneel down and to look carefully in the face of that man on the Cross and then slowly to say ten times in a whisper,

“I do not care what you suffered for me on that Cross.”

The Jewish boy was unable to get past the seventh repetition of these whispered words. By that time he was in tears and had realized in faith the Christian truth that he was looking at an image of God himself hanging on a Cross.