Saint Jerome

Priest and Doctor of the Church
(c. 347–420)

Saint Jerome was born around 347 at Stridon, on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia. He received an excellent classical education at Rome under the great grammarian Donatus and was baptised as a young man. He then travelled to Trier, where he began to study theology, and to Aquileia, where he joined a circle of devout clergy who were drawn to the ascetic life. He spent several years as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis in Syria, where he learned Hebrew from a Jewish convert, an achievement that would prove the decisive gift of his long intellectual career.

He returned to Rome and served for a time as secretary to Pope Damasus I, who commissioned him to revise the Latin translations of the Scriptures then in use, which were many, varied, and often unreliable. Jerome undertook this task with the thoroughness of a great scholar, working directly from the original Hebrew and Greek texts. The result, completed over many years, was the Latin Vulgate Bible, which became the standard version of Scripture for the Western Church and remains the official Latin text of the Catholic Bible.

He left Rome after the death of Damasus in 384 and eventually settled in Bethlehem, where he established a monastery and a convent near the Church of the Nativity and lived for the last thirty-four years of his life. There he continued his enormous literary output: biblical commentaries, theological treatises, biographical writings, and above all a vast correspondence that touched every major theological and ecclesiastical question of his time. His letters are among the masterpieces of Latin literature.

He was a man of fiery temperament and sharp tongue, whose controversies with contemporaries including Rufinus and Pelagius were conducted with considerable heat. But beneath the polemicist was a scholar of extraordinary learning and a man of deep ascetic piety. He died at Bethlehem on September 30, 420. He was declared a Doctor of the Church, and his feast is celebrated on September 30th.