Feast day: September 30

St. Jerome

Priest & Doctor of the Church · c. 347–420

Patron of Translators, librarians, scholars

Brilliant, famously irritable scholar who spent 30+ years in a Bethlehem cave translating the Bible into Latin — the Vulgate that served the Church for 1,500 years.

Jerome was born about 340 at Stridon, on the borders of Dalmatia, and educated at Rome, where he drank deeply of classical learning and was baptized as a young man. Brilliant, restless, and famously sharp-tongued, he traveled widely, lived for a time as a hermit in the Syrian desert wrestling with his temptations, learned Hebrew from a Jewish convert, and was ordained a priest, though he never wished to exercise the office in the ordinary way.

At Rome he served as secretary to Pope Damasus, who set him the task that would be his life's monument: to bring order to the many divergent Latin versions of the Bible. Jerome revised the Gospels and the Psalms, then, convinced that the Old Testament must be translated afresh from the original Hebrew rather than the Greek, undertook the enormous labor that produced the Latin Bible known as the Vulgate — the Church's Scripture for over a thousand years.

After the death of his patron he settled at Bethlehem, near the place of Christ's birth, where with a community of devout Roman women who had followed him he lived a life of study, asceticism, and prayer. From his cell there poured commentaries on nearly the whole of Scripture, learned letters, translations, and fierce controversial writings against the errors of his day.

No one in the ancient Church matched his mastery of the biblical languages and texts, and he insisted that 'ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.' He died at Bethlehem in 420 and is honored as a Father and Doctor of the Church and the patron of biblical scholars, translators, and librarians.

He had a temper that scorched even his friends, proving sanctity is a long road: holiness isn't a personality type.

“Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”
— St. Jerome

Image: Matthias Stom (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/08341a.htm