Doctors of the Church
St. Alphonsus Maria Liguori The Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, page 444: “Poor Jews! You invoked a dreadful curse upon your own heads in saying: ‘His blood be upon us and our children’; and that curse, miserable race, you carry upon you to this day, and to the End of Time you shall endure the chastisement of that innocent blood.”
St. Jerome, Epist. 151, ad Algasiam, question II: “The Jews, after having despised the truth in person, will receive lies in receiving the Antichrist.”
St. Ambrose, Sermo 37, The Two Ships: “The faithlessness of the ѕуηαgσgυє is an insult to the Savior. Therefore He chose the barque of Peter, and deserted that of Moses; that is, He rejected the faithless ѕуηαgσgυє, and adopts the believing Church.”
St. Ambrose, in The Great Commentary of Cornelius a Lapide, Vol. 3, page 311: “O Jєωιѕн hearts, harder than rocks!”
St. Ambrose, Enarratio on Psalms XLIII: “This shows that the Jews, who did not want to believe in Jesus Christ, will believe in the Antichrist.”
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter #363: “The Jews must not be persecuted or chased like beasts....They are living signs that remind us of the Passion of our Lord. Besides, they are scattered through the world so that, while they pay for such a crime, they can be the witnesses of our redemption.”
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, SS: “O intelligence coarse, dense, and cow-like, which did not recognize God even in His own works! Perhaps the Jew will complain that I call his intelligence bovine, but his intelligence is less than bovine: ‘The ox knows his Owner, and the ass knows his Master's crib, but Israel has not known Me, and My people have not understood’ (Isaias 1:3). You see, O Jew, I am easier on you than your own prophet!”
St. Cyril of Alexandria: “It has come to pass that the last state of Israel is worse than the first for, as the Savior's disciples says (II Peter 2:21, 22), it would be better for them not to have known the way of justice than, after they have known it, to turn back from that holy commandment which was delivered to them. For that of the true proverb has happened to them: the dog has returned to his vomit, and the sow that was washed has returned to wallowing in the mire (Proverbs 26:11). And from what they afterwards dared to do, it is plain to see that they have swallowed their vomit and have turned again to wallow in their ancient mire and have lapsed into the errors of Egypt, for the evil spirit has again entered into them, and their last state has become worse than their first.”
St. Ephrem: “What is your iniquity, O daughter of Jacob, that your chastisement is so severe? You have dishonored the King and the King's Son, you shameless one, you harlot!”
St. Gregory nαzιanzen: “If anyone does not worship the Crucified One, let him be anathema and numbered among the deicides.”
St. John Chrysostom, Homily on Romans, 6:12: “Yet surely Paul’s object everywhere is to annul this Law… And with much reason; for it was through a fear and a horror of this that the Jews obstinately opposed grace.”
St. John Chrysostom, First Homily Adversus Judaeos: “Many, I know, respect the Jews and think that their present way of life is a venerable one. This is why I hasten to uproot and tear out this deadly opinion. I said that the ѕуηαgσgυє is no better than a theater and I bring forward a prophet as my witness. Surely the Jews are not more deserving of belief than their prophets. ‘You had a harlot's brow; you became shameless before all.’ Where a harlot has set herself up, that place is a brothel. But the ѕуηαgσgυє is not only a brothel and a theater; it also is a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts. Jeremiah said: ‘Your house has become for me the den of a hyena.’ He does not simply say ‘of wild beast,’ but ‘of a filthy wild beast,’ and again: ‘I have abandoned my house, I have cast off my inheritance.’ But when God forsakes a people, what hope of salvation is left? When God forsakes a place, that place becomes the dwelling of demons.”
St. John Chrysostom, Catena Aurea, Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 27: “Observe here the infatuation of the Jews; their headlong haste, and destructive passions will not let them see what they ought to see, and they curse themselves, saying, ‘His blood be upon us,’ and even entail the curse upon their children. Yet a merciful God did not ratify this sentence, but accepted such of them and of their children as repented; for Paul was of them, and many thousands of those who in Jerusalem believed.”
St. John Chrysostom, Homily II:
“…(6) I have spoken these words to you. You will speak them to those Judaizers, and they to their wives. ‘Fortify one another.’ If a catechumen is sick with this disease, let him be kept outside the church doors. If the sick one be a believer and already initiated, let him be driven from the holy table. For not all sins need exhortation and counsel; some sins, of their very nature, demand cure by a quick and sharp excision. The wounds we can tolerate respond to more gentle cures; those which have festered and cannot be cured, those which are feeding on the rest of the body, need cauterization with a point of steel. So is it with sins. Some need long exhortation; others need sharp rebuke.
“(7) This is why Paul did not enjoin us to exhort in every case but also to rebuke sharply: ‘Wherefore rebuke them sharply.’ Therefore, I will now rebuke them sharply, so that they may accuse themselves and feel shame for what they have done. Then they will never again be hurt by that sinful fast.
“(8) So I shall put aside exhortation henceforth as I testify and exclaim: ‘If any man does not love the Lord Jesus Christ, let a curse be upon him.’ What greater evidence could there be that a man does not love our Lord than when he participates in the festival with those who slew Christ? It was not I who hurled the curse at them, but Paul. Rather, it was not Paul but Christ, who spoke through him and said earlier: ‘Those who are justified in the law have fallen away from grace.’
“(9) So speak these words to them, read aloud to them these texts. Show all your zeal in saving them. When you have snatched them from the devil’s jaws, bring them to me on the day of the Jєωιѕн fast. Then, after I have kept the rest of my promise to you, let us, with one accord and with one voice, join our brothers in giving glory to God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, for to Him is glory forever. Amen.”
St. John Chrysostom, Homily 6 Adversus Judaeos: “How dare Christians have the slightest doings with Jews, those most miserable of all men! They are lustful, rapacious, greedy, perfidious bandits, pests of the universe. Indeed, an entire day would not suffice to tell of all their rapine, their avarice, their deception of the poor, their thievery, and their huckstering. Are they not inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil? Jews are impure and impious, and their ѕуηαgσgυє is a house of prostitution, a lair of beasts, a place of shame and ridicule, the domicile of the devil, as is also the soul of the Jew. As a matter of fact, Jews worship the devil: their rites are criminal and unchaste; their religion a disease; their ѕуηαgσgυє an assembly of crooks, a den of thieves, a cavern of devils, an abyss of perdition! Why are the Jews degenerate? Because of their hateful assassination of Christ. This supreme crime lies at the root of their degradation and woes. The rejection and the dispersion of the Jews was the work of God and because of His absolute abandonment of the Jews. Thus, the Jew will live under the yoke of slavery without end. God hates the Jews, and on Judgement Day He will say to those who sympathise with them: “Depart from me, for you have had doings with My murderers!” Flee, then, from their assemblies, fly from their houses, and, far from venerating the ѕуηαgσgυє, hold it in hatred and aversion”
St. Augustine, Letters, 74, 4: “Instead of the grace of the law which has passed away, we have received the grace of the gospel which is abiding; and instead of the shadows and types of the old dispensation, the truth has come by Jesus Christ. Jeremiah also prophesied thus in God’s name: ‘Behold, the days come, says the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah...’ Observe what the prophet says, not to Gentiles, who had not been partakers in any former covenant, but to the Jєωιѕн nation. He who has given them the law by Moses, promises in place of it the New Covenant of the gospel, that they might no longer live in the oldness of the letter, but in the newness of the spirit.”
St. Augustine, in The Anguish of the Jews by Fr Edward Flannery, Macmillan, 1954 (cf), and in The Faith of the Early Fathers by Fr Jurgens, Collegeville, 1979: “Judaism, since Christ, is a corruption; indeed, Judas is the image of the Jєωιѕн people: their understanding of Scripture is carnal; they bear the guilt for the death of the Savior, for through their fathers they have killed Christ. The Jews held Him; the Jews insulted Him; the Jews bound Him; they crowned Him with thorns and dishonored Him by spitting upon Him; they scourged Him; they heaped abuses on Him; they hung Him upon a tree.”
St. Augustine, Sermon 91, PL38:567: “Our Lord Jesus Christ referred to Himself as ‘the Stone’ (Mt. 21:44). Lying on the ground, it shakes whoever falls over it; coming from on high, it crushes the proud. The Jews have already been shaken by their previous stumble. What awaits them is to be crushed by His Coming.”
St. Augustine, “Against the Jews,” PL 42:51: “The Jews wander over the entire earth, their backs bent over and their eyes cast downward, forever calling to our minds the curse they carry with them.”
St. Basil the Great, “On Prayer,” Sermon IX, PG 32; SS vol.II p.384: “If someone should kill the beloved son of a man, and then stretch forth their hands still stained with blood to the afflicted father, asking for fellowship, would not the blood of his son, visible on the hand of his murderer, provoke him to just anger instead? And such are the prayers of the Jews, for when they stretch forth their hands in prayer, they only remind God the Father of their sin against His Son. And at every stretching-forth of their hands, they only make it obvious that they are stained with the blood of Christ. For they who persevere in their blindness inherit the blood-guilt of their fathers; for they cried out: ‘His blood be upon us, and upon our children’ (Matthew xxvii.25).”
St. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Judaeorum: “It would be licit, according to custom, to hold Jews in perpetual servitude because of their crime.”
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