By Jonathan Luxmoore | Catholic News Service

Born into a wealthy French banking family, Jacques Fesch was expelled from school for laziness and misconduct. In 1954 he tried to rob a currency dealer, and he eventually was executed for killing a police officer who was pursuing him. He is now a candidate for sainthood.

Fesch recorded his spiritual journey of his prison conversion in a journal which was preserved by his wife, whom he married in a Catholic ceremony a few days before being beheaded at the age of 27 in La Sante Prison in 1957.

Based on his writings, Fesch’s sainthood cause was launched in the Archdiocese of Paris under a 1987 decree by the late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. The Paris archdiocesan postulator hopes to forward the case to the Vatican’s Congregation for Saints’ Causes in 2009.

“Of course, it would be unprecedented to beatify an executed murderer — the only comparison would be the man crucified alongside Jesus Christ,” said Jean Duchesne, president of the Paris diocesan commission reviewing Fesch’s life.

“But Fesch considered his own execution a gift from God, a blessing by divine providence,” said Duchesne. “The message is that God still cares for someone who’s been legally sentenced to death and executed. No one is so abandoned and rejected as to be beyond God’s love.”

Writings by the killer, who described his prison conversion as “a violent wind that passes without anyone knowing from where it came,” later formed the basis for three regularly reprinted best-sellers, “Light Over the Scaffold,” “Cell 18,” and “In Five Hours I shall See Jesus.”