SAINT OF THE DAY
MONDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER, 2024
SAINT JEROME
PRIEST AND DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH
(345 - 420)
EARLY LIFE
St. Jerome was born about the year 342 in a small town called Stridonium in Dalmatia (now part of Croatia), and he died in the year 420 in the town of Bethlehem, where Our Savior was born. St. Jerome received very good education and excellent moral principles from his father at home, after which he was sent to Rome for further studies. While a student in the great city, away from home, he became, as he was to accuse himself later in life, more of a pagan than a Christian.
THE DREAM
From this woeful condition, he was converted by a dramatic experience: He had a dream in which he found himself before the judgment seat of Christ. When asked by the Just Judge, Who knows every deed and thought of men, to declare what he was, Jerome replied that he was a Christian. “You lie,” answered the Judge, “you are rather a Ciceronian, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” He then received his due punishment in the dream, and woke up to find himself a changed man. After this conversion, he lived a life of extreme penance and mortification.
HIS TRAVELS
After that he began a life of travels in pursuit of learning. He visited nearly every major center of learning in his time, Trier in Germany, Aquileia in Italy, Marseilles, Toulouse, Bourdeaux, Autun and Lyons in France etc.
HIS AUSTERITY
Jerome stayed for four years in the desert of Chalcis in Syria, which were passed in study and in the practice of austerity. He had many attacks of illness but suffered still more from temptation. "In the remotest part of a wild and stony desert," he wrote years afterwards to his friend Eustochium, "burnt up with the heat of the sun, so scorching that it frightens even the monks who live there, I seemed to myself to be in the midst of the delights and crowds of Rome.... In this exile and prison to which through fear of Hell I had voluntarily condemned myself, with no other company but scorpions and wild beasts, I many times imagined myself watching the dancing of Roman maidens as if I had been in the midst of them. My face was pallid with fasting, yet my will felt the assaults of desire. In my cold body and my parched flesh, which seemed dead before its death, passion was still able to live. Alone with the enemy, I threw myself in spirit at the feet of Jesus, watering them with my tears, and tamed my flesh by fasting whole weeks. I am not ashamed to disclose my temptations, though I grieve that I am not now what I then was."
THE VULGATE BIBLE
Finally, Jerome moved to Constantinople. He studied Scripture under the Greek theologian Gregory Nazianzen. Pope Damasus summoned him to Rome and commissioned our saint to do the great work of his life, the Latin Bible (a 30-year task). His translation, called the Vulgate, became the official text of the Catholic Church. The saint was already versed in Greek and Latin. Most of the Old Testament was inspired in Hebrew, some books in Greek, and some parts in Aramaic. In the New Testament, Matthew was in Aramaic, and all the other books in Greek. That is why a mastery of these three languages was necessary for the work he was assigned to do by the Pope.
The Vulgate version proved to be a great gift to the Church and to all succeeding generations. This achievement is not likely to be duplicated —never mind surpassed — because the saint had at his disposal texts and codices that do not exist today, and the means to be taught the sacred languages which were, at his time, still living languages. Besides having these texts, and his personal gifts of intellect and scholarship, Saint Jerome possessed in his person that intense holiness of life and great concern for orthodoxy indispensable to those who concern themselves with the study and interpretation of God's revelations.
STRONG WILLED AND STRONG TEMPERAMENT
Jerome was strong willed. His writings, especially those opposing what he considered heresy, were sometimes explosive. His temperament helped him do difficult tasks, but it also made him enemies. Jerome was named a Doctor of the Church for the Vulgate, his commentaries on Scripture, his writings on monastic life, and his belief that during a controversy on theological opinions, the See of Rome was where the matter should be settled.Jerome also guided a group of Christian widows who were practicing a semimonastic life. Gossip about his spending so much time with women led Jerome to move to Bethlehem. There, Jerome trained Paula and Eustochium to be Scripture scholars and to assist him.
HERETIC ATTACKS
Pelagian heretics, who, relying on the protection of Bishop John of Jerusalem, sent a troop of ruffians to Bethlehem to disperse the monks and nuns living there under the direction of Jerome, who had been opposing Pelagianism with his customary truculence. Some of the monks were beaten, a deacon was killed, and monasteries were set on fire. Jerome had to go into hiding for a time.
DEATH
The following year Paula's daughter Eustochium died. The aged Jerome soon fell ill, and after lingering for two years succumbed. Worn with penance and excessive labor, his sight and voice almost gone, his body like a shadow, he died peacefully on September 30, 420, and was buried under the church of the Nativity at Bethlehem.
PATRON: Archeologists; archivists; Bible scholars; librarians; libraries; schoolchildren; students; translators.
PRAYER: O God, who gave the Priest Saint Jerome a living and tender love for Sacred Scripture, grant that your people may be ever more fruitfully nourished by your Word and find in it the fount of life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.