The Meaning of Catholic

Dom Prosper Gueranger has some really beautiful explanations of the Church's traditional theology of the Jews in his Liturgical Year. It strikes me both how Gueranger is critical of the Jews in their errors, but also sees them as still having an important status and looks forward to the eventual union of the Jews and the Church. Here is are some excerpts for example from his commentary on the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost. The gifts and vocations of God are, as the apostle expresses it, without repentance or regret on His part. Those Jews, who are now His enemies because they reject the Gospel, are still called charissimi; they are still the beloved and dearly beloved, because of their fathers. For the same reason, a time will come — and the whole world is waiting for it — when the denial of Juda being revoked and his iniquities blotted out, the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, will be literally fulfilled. Then the divine unity of the two Testaments will be made evident; and the two peoples themselves will be made one, under their one Head, Christ Jesus. The covenant of God with man being then fully realized, such as He had designed it in His eternal wisdom — the earth having yielded its fruit, the world having done its work, the sepulchres will give back their dead, and history will cease here on earth, leaving glorified human nature to bloom in unreserved fullness of life, under God's complacent eye. ... But the Jew is far from being ready to understand these great mysteries. And yet the Law had been given to him that it might serve him as a hand leading him to Christ, and without exposing him to err. It was a signal favour granted him, not from any merits of his own, but because of his fathers. The favour was all the more precious, inasmuch as it was bestowed at a time when the tradition regarding a future Redeemer was almost entirely lost by the bulk of mankind. Gratitude should have been uppermost in the heart of Juda; but pride took its place. He was so taken up with the honour that had been put on him, that it made him lose all desire for the Messiah. He could not endure the thought that a time would come, when the Sun of justice having risen for the whole earth, the limited advantage which was given to a few during the hours of night was to be eclipsed by the bright noon of a light which all might enjoy. He, therefore, proclaimed that the old Law was definitive, though the Law declared itself to be but transitory ; he, therefore, insisted on the perpetuity of the reign of types and shadows. He laid it down as a dogma that no divine intervention can ever equal that made on Sinai; that every future prophet, everyone sent by God, must be inferior to Moses; that all possible salvation is in the Law, and that from it alone flows every grace. ... How many ages of apparent abandonment, of humiliation and suffering, must pass over Juda too, before he will recognize and adore His God, and confess to Him his sins, and give Him his devoted love, and, like this stranger, hear Jesus pronounce his pardon, and say : Arise! Go thy way! thy faith hath made thee whole and saved thee ! Let us, by our fervent prayers, hasten the time which will be so glorious for the two peoples, when, united in the same faith by the consciousness of the same hopes then realized, they will cry out to our Redeemer ... Oh ! when will the children of Juda come and experience for themselves the superiority of the Bread of the new Testament over the manna of the old? Let us Gentiles, the last-comers, but who have preceded our elder brethren at the banquet of love, sing all the more fervently in our Communion-anthem the divine sweetness of this true Bread of heaven. - The Liturgical Year, vol. 11, 320-25