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St. Ephrem of Edessa (+373 A.D.)1 :
*"…the rod of Aaron that budded, truly have you appeared as a stem whose flower is your true Son, our Christ, my God and my Maker; you did bear according to the flesh God and the Word, did preserve your virginity before His birth, did remain a virgin after His birth, and we have been reconciled to God by Christ your Son."
***St. Cyril of Jerusalem (+386 A.D.)2 :
***“Of Him Who is God and Man are you the Mother, Virgin before (His) birth, Virgin in birth, and Virgin after birth.”
***St. Jerome (+420 A.D.), Contra Helvidius, i:
***“Suppose that the Brethren of the Lord were Joseph’s sons by another wife. But we understand the Brethren of the Lord to be not the sons of Joseph, but cousins of the Savior, the sons of Mary, his mother’s sister.”
***St. Augustine of Hippo, Holy Virginity (401 A.D.):
***“In being born of a Virgin who chose to remain a Virgin even before she knew who was to be born of her, Christ wanted to approve virginity rather than impose it. And He wanted virginity to be of free choice even in that woman in whom He took upon Himself the form of a slave.”
***St. Augustine of Hippo (+430 A.D.), De Annunt. Dom. iii:
***“It is written (Ezekiel 44, 2): ‘This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall pass through it. Because the Lord the God of Israel hath entered in by it…’ What means this closed gate in the house of the Lord, except that Mary is to be ever inviolate? What does it mean that ‘no man shall pass through it,’ save that Joseph shall not know her? And what is this - ‘The Lord alone enters in and goeth out by it,’ except that the Holy Ghost shall impregnate her, and that the Lord of Angels shall be born of her? And what means this - ‘It shall be shut for evermore,’ but that Mary is a Virgin before His birth, a Virgin in His birth, and a Virgin after His birth.”
***St. John Chrysostom (+407 A.D.), Opus Imperf. in Matt., Hom. 1 (?):
***“Joseph did not know her, until she gave birth, being unaware of her dignity: but after she had given birth, then did he know her (by way of acquaintance). Because by reason of her child she surpassed the whole world in beauty and dignity: Since she alone in the narrow abode of her womb received him whom the world cannot contain.”
*Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566):
He is born of His Mother without any diminution of her maternal virginity, just as He afterwards went forth from the sepulcher while it was closed and sealed, and entered the room in which His disciples were assembled, the doors being shut; or, not to depart from every-day examples, just as the rays of the sun penetrate without breaking or injuring in the least the solid substance of glass, so after a like but more exalted manner did Jesus Christ come forth from His mother’s womb without injury to her maternal virginity. This immaculate and perpetual virginity forms, therefore, the just theme of our eulogy. Such was the work of the Holy Ghost, who at the Conception and birth of the Son so favored the Virgin Mother as to impart to her fecundity while preserving inviolate her perpetual virginity.
**Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992):
Mary - “ever-virgin”
No. 499: **The deepening of faith in the virginal motherhood led the Church to confess Mary’s real and perpetual virginity even in the act of giving birth to the Son of God made man. In fact, Christ’s birth “did not diminish His Mother’s virginal integrity but sanctified it.” And so the liturgy of the Church celebrates Mary as Aeiparthenos, the “Ever-virgin.”
**No. 500: **Against this doctrine the objection is sometimes raised that the Bible mentions brothers and sisters of Jesus. The Church has always understood these passages as not referring to other children of the Virgin Mary. In fact James and Joseph, “brothers of Jesus,” are the sons of another Mary, a disciple of Christ, whom St. Matthew significantly calls “the other Mary.” They are close relations of Jesus, according to an Old Testament expression.
**No. 501: **Jesus is Mary’s Son, but her spiritual motherhood extends to all men whom indeed he came to save: “The Son whom she brought forth is he whom God placed as the first-born among many brethren, that is, the faithful in whose generation and formulation she co-operates with a mother’s love.”
), Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating (especially the latter half of the book in which the focus turns from fundamentalists to teachings of the Catholic Church they usually attack), Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic by David Currie, and Where We Got the Bible by Henry Graham.