Continuing with the Doctors of the Church - Saint Jerome

Remember, a long, long time ago, at the end of September, 2019, when the bishops decided to name the following twelve months from the feast of Saint Jerome the Year of the Word? Well, a lot has happened since then, but I reckon the Bishop would still like us to make an effort to discover a new devotion to Holy Scripture.

I had set aside that book on the Church Doctors, but I'm diving back into it. I've been compiling short biographies of the Doctors based on the book on a page on this blog, and I'm up to the fourth-century Saint Jerome, often depicted in imagery as a cardinal of the Roman Church, because of his close relationship with the Holy Father Damasus. Jerome had an extraordinary devotion to Holy Scripture, spending a great deal of time gaining expertise in Hebrew (as well as Greek), and then translating into Latin (the Vulgate) for the Pope, who had begun to see that knowledge of Greek was declining in the West, even among the educated. Jerome was born in Dalmatia in the mid-fourth-century into a Christian family, and chose the eremitical life after baptism, often retreating to a life of solitude in the Holy Land, and devoting his time there to the study of Scripture. In AD 382, he arrived in Rome and became a secretary to the Holy Father Damasus. Aside from his work in producing the Vulgate Bible, he became a spiritual director and teacher of Scripture to many holy women, who also took up the study of the ancient languages. Jerome left Rome when Damasus died, and found his way to Bethlehem, where he died in about AD 420, having left behind a vast body of work on Scripture and a teaching legacy, both classical and Christian. Jerome thought that Scripture was a very personal means of communing with God, as well as a unifying force in the Christian communion. Devotion to Scripture study is therefore meant for us all, and brings with it a particular joy and the gift of Eternity. Thus prayer is meant to alternate with reading Scripture, in an ongoing conversation with God our Love. His love of asceticism and meditative prayer is just as strong as his love of Scripture. Then there was his love for the Holy Land, his place of retirement. He also had much advice about hard work and labour as a means of strengthening the soul against sin and building the Christian life, even in the rearing of children. In this, and in his general attitude to life and culture, Jerome seems to have been far ahead of his times.