Christ is crucified by every sinner – not just those who are Jewish
Gavin Ashenden• April 18, 2025
“And Pilate seeing that he prevailed nothing, but that rather a tumult was made; taking water washed his hands before the people, saying: I am innocent of the blood of this just man; look you to it. And the whole people answering, said: His blood be upon us and our children.” (Matt 27.24)
The question of inherited guilt is a fraught one. But for a variety of complex reasons, spiritual, theological, pathological, the Jews have born such guilt down the generations and the list of pogroms and massacres defaces shames humanity in every century.
In the Church, theological reflection morphed into pathological antipathy. In the earliest centuries of the Christian era, given extra weight by St Augustine, a relatively bland pre-existing pagan antagonism toward Jews was replaced by historical and theological beliefs that the Jewish people were abhorrent and that any injustice done to them, short of murder, was justified.
This was often manifested in a complex, almost bipolar, set of attitudes. St Bernard of Clairvaux (d.1153) provides us with one such example.
On the one hand he described the Jews as deicides, slaves and racially evil. On the other he chastised his protégé, a French Cistercian monk called Rodolphe, who preached to vast crowds that the Jewish enemies of God should be “punished”, triggering massacres in Strasbourg, Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Speyer, Wurzburg and other German and French cities.
St Bernard went to Germany to silence Rodolphe and restrain popular pathological piety. “It is good for you to fight the Ishmaelites (Turks),” he remonstrated, “but whoever touches a Jew to take his life is like one who touched the apple of the eye of Jesus; for Jews are his flesh and bone. My disciple Rodolphe has spoken in error.”
Yet it has to be acknowledged that St Bernard’s restraint was modified by an odd scale of values. He later told the Archbishop of Mainz that Rodolphe’s murderous preaching against the Jews was in fact the least of his three offences, the other two being unauthorised preaching and contempt for episcopal authority. The implications of this need a few moments to sink in for the modern, let alone the post modern reader.
But the horror of these massacres is made worse by the fact that they do not stand alone. The history of our whole culture is punctuated by such events. In our island, the destruction of the whole Jewish population of York besieged by the mob in Clifford’s tower in 1190 remains a haunting and chillingly shaming example. The unimaginable climax to these horrors found its pinnacle in Auschwitz. And the line of connection between them is unbroken one. What does it take for a nation’s workers, middle class, aristocracy, artists and intellectuals to collaborate in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of its Jewish neighbours and millions outside its national borders?
As the historian Walter Zwi Bacharach wrote, “no human being gets up one fine morning and sets out to kill Jews, just because he is ordered to do so”.
It takes centuries of slow, steady, relentless and remorseless inculcation to dehumanise one particular group of people before such a thing can happen on such a scale and sadly anti-Semitism is alive and well.
Fr James Mawdsley is an influential and, in traditional circles, much admired and respected priest (though suspended by the FSSP in 2021) who has risen to prominence both in self-published books and on YouTube and other internet platforms. He is unambiguous in his focussed claims about ‘the Jews’
They included: “Auschwitz is the biggest lie in history” … “The Holocaust is a lie. It didn’t happen” …. “Hitler did not set out to conquer Europe, while the Jews schemed then and now to rule the world”.
Fr Mawdsley informed a podcast called The Backlash recently that “many Jews suffered as they were being expelled from Europe by the Nazis, but there was no genocidal plan from Hitler or the Germans to annihilate the Jews. That’s all a lie. And that’s what they wielded then as a weapon against the Church”.
Invited to discuss the Good Friday liturgy on the Catholic Unscripted podcast, he described the intervention of Jewish figures in the 1960s to persuade Pope John XXIII to change the Church’s position on “the Jews” as successful infiltration.
“I think that the Jews have basically infiltrated the church, destroyed her liturgy, her dogma, her morals, and unless we call that out and overcome that and be honest about the governance in our Catholic faith then things are only going to get worse,” he said.
Like St Bernard of Clairvaux, Dr Joseph Shaw, chairman of the Latin Mass Society, has rebutted Fr Mawdsley’s account of the history in two recent papers.
Fr Mawdsley accusation is that the “infiltration” was the work of the Jewish historian, Jules Isaac, who personally lobbied both Pope Pius XII and Pope John XXIII, and also the American Jewish Committee. In the chairman’s blog of the Latin Mass Society Dr Shaw writes: “This month I have an article in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. It takes it start from a 1961 Memorandum sent to the Holy See, Anti Jewish Elements in Catholic Liturgy by the American Jewish Committee, which was intended to influence the reform.”
He asks the question: “Did the reformers of the Consilium act on them?”
And reassures his audience: “The short answer is ‘no’. I was myself surprised to discover this, but the evidence is quite clear. I encourage readers interested in the subject to read my paper which sets out why I come to that conclusion in full.”
Those who want to pursue this in depth should do so. For our purposes today it may be enough to note Dr Shaw’s response to Fr Mawdsley’s claim that the Isaac and the American Jewish Committee achieved a reset of the Catholic Church’s commitment to pray for the conversion of the Jews.
“Interestingly, the Memorandum authors, although focused on Holy Week and particularly with Good Friday, do not call for the removal of the prayer for the conversion of the Jews found in the Good Friday Orationes Solemnes (Intercessions)” he said. “They raise no objection to Catholics calling upon God to convert Jews, in itself.
It is often assumed that the prayer for the Jews found in the 1969 Missal reflects concerns about Jewish sensitivities, but a more detailed examination of the process of reform undermines this assumption.
It is true that the 1969 prayer is less trenchantly expressed than its predecessor, but a petition for the Jews’ conversion to Christianity is implied in the petition that they “may arrive at the fullness of redemption” (ad redemptionis mereatur plenitudinem pervenire). The Consilium had, moreover, produced an intermediate version, which was promulgated in 1965, whose “bidding” is as follows: “Let us pray also for the Jews: that our God and Lord may be pleased to shine the light of his face over them; that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord as the Redeemer of all.”
The Consilium went on to produce a good number of equally explicit prayers for the conversion of the Jews for the 1971 Litany of the Hours.
“A better explanation of the softening of the language of the Good Friday Intercession is simply that the Consilium wished to soften the language of all the Orationes Solemnes. The Prayer for “Heretics and Schismatics”, which in the former Missal had called on God to “look upon the souls deceived by diabolical fraud, that abandoning all heretical depravity, the hearts of the erring may regain sanity and return to the unity of truth,” becomes a prayer “For the Unity of Christians” which asks that they may “grasp more fully the mystery of your godhead, and . . . become more perfect witnesses of your love”. The prayer for the conversion of pagans is similarly recast in more emollient terms.”
What is exhibited is the shift of culture reflected in a shift of language demonstrating a (welcome or not) complex gear change of late modernity that the Second Council dealt with; not a Jewish conspiracy of theological vandalism.
Dr Shaw works through the other contested elements we not have space for here, but addressing the infiltration of the Jews accusation he concludes: “On balance, it seems clear that the Consilium was not guided in its task in any systematic way by Jewish concerns. They quite literally did not receive the memo as I have now shown, this argument is demonstrably false.”
What I found as surprising as disturbing is the willingness amongst Catholics nearer the traditional end of the scale (my kind of Catholics, if it’s not a contradiction in ecclesial terms) to welcome accusations against “the Jews”.
What is anti-Semitism? A diabolical spirit? A historical memory burnt into our corporate psyche? An open invitation to bully a perpetually outcast victim? A theological perversion?
Whatever it is, it manifests in two things, people using the words “the Jews” stripped of adjectival distinction or nuance, and a tone of voice that is hard to pin down but now in both history and imagination leads inexorably to the memory of a gas chamber or a mass burial pit.
With the politics of Gaza, the intensification of Islamic political influence in Europe and the Holocaust being dismissed as “an old man’s preoccupation”, anti-Semitism has found a new lease of life among us. But the Catholic Church is the last place that should give it easy oxygen.
With our fair share of St Augustines, St Bernards and Rodolphes the Catholic Church has the responsibility to balance the facts of history, the complexities of theology and the predisposition to find scapegoats wherever convenient. And the Jews have always been very convenient.
A hero pope who claims the respect and affection of Catholics of different outlooks, St John Paul II visited Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust museum in Israel, and apologised for centuries of Catholic antisemitism. We might want to allow him to speak for us on this solemn day in the liturgical calendar.
This is what he said: “I assure the Jewish people the Catholic Church … is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place.”
He added that there were “no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust”.
As sinners, of every race and disposition, of Jews and Gentiles alike, the blood of Christ is upon each and every one of us.
“All we like sheep have gone astray, every one hath turned aside into his own way: and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53.6)
Photo: Jan van Hemessen’s Christ carrying the Cross