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- Known mostly for his translation of the Scriptures into Latin, Saint Jerome was also an inspiring writer of letters and commentaries. He was said to have had a bad temper, yet he was a man of prayer and penance. A combination of conflicting qualities, Saint Jerome stands out as one of the four great Doctors of the Latin Church.
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Oct 21, 2004 · Saint Jerome (c. 341-420) is both a Father and a Doctor of the Church; and he has, through the centuries, been a great light and inspiration to the whole world. We are convinced that we need him now more than ever and in a very special way, facing as we are the present crisis of faith, and the multitude of rampant heresies devastating the ...
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St. Jerome (born c. 347, Stridon, Dalmatia—died 419/420, Bethlehem, Palestine; feast day September 30) biblical translator and monastic leader, traditionally regarded as the most learned of the Latin Fathers. He lived for a time as a hermit, became a priest, served as secretary to Pope Damasus I, and about 389 established a monastery at Bethlehem. ...
Jerome was born of well-to-do Christian parents at Stridon, probably near the modern Ljubljana, Slovenia. His education, begun at home, was continued in Rome when he was about 12. There he studied grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy. A serious scholar enamoured of Latin literature, he frequented the catacombs and near the end of his Roman education was baptized (c. 366), probably by Pope Liberius.
He spent the next 20 years in travel and impermanent residences. At Treveris (later Trier), he was profoundly attracted to monasticism. Possibly as early as 369 he was back in the vicinity of Stridon. In Aquileia (Italy) he was linked with an ascetic elite—including Tyrannius Rufinus, a writer and scholar, who translated the 3rd-century Alexandrian theologian Origen—grouped around Bishop Valerianus. When the group disbanded (c. 373), Jerome decided to go on a trip through the East. On reaching Antioch in 374, fatigued by travel and by inner conflict, he rested as a guest of the priest Evagrius of Antioch and there may have composed his earliest known work, De septies percussa (“Concerning Seven Beatings”). There also, in mid-Lent 375, during a near-fatal illness, he had a celebrated dream. In that dream, in which he was dragged before a tribunal of the Lord, he was accused of being a Ciceronian—a follower of the 1st-century-bce Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero—rather than a Christian, and he was severely lashed; he vowed never again to read or possess pagan literature.
Long afterward, in controversy with Rufinus, Jerome minimized the dream’s importance, but for years it prevented him from reading the classics for pleasure, and at the time it was the cause of a genuine spiritual crisis. One result of the dream was his first exegetical (critical interpretive) work, an allegorical commentary on the biblical book Obadiah, which he disowned 21 years later as a youthful production of fervent ignorance.
In 375 Jerome began a two-year search for inner peace as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis. The experience was not altogether successful. A novice in spiritual life, he had no expert guide, and, speaking only Latin, he was confronted with Syriac and Greek. Lonely, he begged for letters, and he found desert food a penance, yet he claimed that he was genuinely happy. His response to temptation was incessant prayer and fasting. He learned Hebrew from a Jewish convert, studied Greek, had manuscripts copied for his library and his friends, and carried on a brisk correspondence.
The crisis arrived when Chalcis became involved with ecclesiastical and theological controversies centring on episcopal succession and Trinitarian (on the nature of the relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and Christological (on the nature of Christ) disputes. Suspected of harbouring heretical views (i.e., Sabellianism, which emphasized God’s unity at the expense of the distinct persons), Jerome insisted that the answer to ecclesiastical and theological problems resided in oneness with the Roman bishop. Pope Damasus I did not respond, and Jerome quit the desert for Antioch.
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St. Jerome. A doctor of the church, Jerome was born 342 in what is now northeastern Italy. His father provided him with a good education, sending him to Rome to learn from the best teachers. His teachers were not Christian, however, and Jerome began to fall into habits of decadence that were the order of the day in Rome.
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St. Jerome is one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church and is perhaps best known for his translation of the Hebrew books of the Bible into Latin, termed as the Vulgate. He teaches us the wisdom of obedience to the Church's magisterial authority, and, certainly, to the supreme earthly authority of the Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ.
Due to his work, Jerome is recognized as a saint and Doctor of the Church by the Catholic Church, and as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, [a] the Lutheran Church, and the Anglican Communion. His feast day is 30 September ( Gregorian calendar ).
Author: Lives of Saints. SAINT JEROME CONFESSOR, DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH—342-420. Feast: September 30. St. Jerome, who was born Eusebius Hieronymous Sophronius, was the most learned of the Fathers of the Western Church. He was born about the year 342 at Stridonius, a small town at the head of the Adriatic, near the episcopal city of Aquileia.
Saint Jerome died in the year 420. He was recognized as a Doctor of the Church for his great learning and writings. Today, he is remembered as the patron saint of translators, librarians, and biblical scholars. His feast day is celebrated on September 30.
