Gospel Delights!

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Memorial of Saint Jerome, Priest and Doctor of the Church

2 Tim 3:14-17; Mt 13:47-52

The Mother Church celebrates the feast of St. Jerome, Priest and Doctor of the Church. If not for St. Jerome, we would not have had the Bible in its present form. But how did his life start? 

Growing up, Jerome was an intelligent and gifted learner. Though his native tongue was the Illyrian dialect, he mastered Greek and Latin when he travelled to Rome for his studies. Greatly aided by his proficiency in Greek and Latin, he also started reading the literature of these languages with great pleasure. 

However, his secular learning became an impediment to his faith. Worldly ideas and unchecked love for pleasure resulted in the loss of the piety that had been instilled in him at home. 

Nevertheless, the Divine Plan worked differently! An anecdote explains his conversion. Once, Jerome had a vision in which he was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgement seat of God. The Judge asked him who he was. Jerome replied, ‘I am a Christian.’ Unsatisfied with the answer, the Judge said to him, ‘You lie; you are a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For ‘where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ 

The vision had a profound impact on Jerome who now decided to abandon his attachment to pagan literature and began to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to God.  

After his conversion, he was ordained a priest. Around the year 382, Father Jerome was summoned to Rome by Pope Damasus to become the pope’s secretary and counselor. The holy father encouraged him to prepare a new translation of the Bible from the Greek and Hebrew translations. At that time, there were many versions of the Bible in Latin that had been translated poorly. The pope wanted one good version, and Father Jerome rose to the occasion. He began with the New Testament, translating it from Greek into Latin.

Later in his life, he settled down in Bethlehem and continued his work of translating the Bible into Latin. He spent about eight years translating the New Testament from the original Greek and then about fifteen years translating the Old Testament from the original Hebrew manuscripts – something that had never been done before! The completed work received acceptance from scholars within the Western Church because of its accuracy and clarity. His translation was referred to as the ‘Vulgate.’ After the Protestant Reformation, in 1546, the Council of Trent declared Saint Jerome’s Vulgate to be the official Latin translation of the Church.

This is the incredible story of St. Jerome’s contribution to the Christian faith. 

Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, described Scripture as ‘the soul of theology.’ 

But the ‘soul’ that made it possible for theology to have its soul in its present form is St. Jerome himself!

From his erudition on both secular literature and the Scriptures, St. Jerome concluded that ‘other books can inform us, but only the Bible can transform us.’ 

That is when he said, ‘Ignorance of Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.’  

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar