Feast of Saint Jerome – Bible Translator and hope of Curmudgeons!

Feeling cranky before your daily caffeine fix? Does the slow driver in front of you make you grumpy? Does the fact that no one loaded the dishwasher or put toner in the printer drive you crazy?

Then take heart! Today is a special feast day for us curmudgeons. We too can achieve sainthood, just like St. Jerome!

St. Jerome is the patron saint of:

• students and archivists and translators – anyone really with a big time-consuming task ahead of them.
• Curmudgeons
• Parents with wayward older children

Who was St. Jerome?

• St. Jerome was born around 342 AD in Italy.
• He received the finest education his parents could give him in Rome.
• But his formation was not religious. As a young man he chucked it all to fall in with a bad crowd and live a sinful life. Even then, he hadn’t quite gotten away from Christianity.
• For fun, Jerome and his friends would visit the Christian tombs. St. Jerome wrote:

“It was my custom on Sundays to visit with friends my own age and tastes, the tombs of the martyrs an Apostles, going down into those subterranean galleries whose walls on both sides preserve the dead.”

• Here he enjoyed deciphering the encryptions!
• In his early 30s, he got really sick and saw his own final judgement.
• He decided then and there to change his life. He became a hermit to atone for his life of pleasure and sin.
• He eventually returned to civilization. To distract himself from sinful habits, he learned Hebrew from a fellow monk.
• Eventually he was ordained. He studied scripture under St. Gregory Nazianzen.
• He is best known for translating the Bible including the Septuagint into Latin.
• Jerome is one of the doctors of the church.

Lessons from the life of St. Jerome.

• He was then able to pull it together, study hard, and eventually performed his life’s work of translating the entire Bible into Latin!
• Piety was instilled in him at home – and eventually, he found his way back.
• He was surrounded by pagan and hedonistic influences – much like our sons are today and…
• It was something that interested him in deciphering inscriptions, that at least kept him connected to his faith and brought him back.

As parents, I think this should give us hope. As long as we surround our kids with the love of Christ and the practice of the faith when they are young, they will always have that experience to ground them as they get older.

My own children had a period of time away from the church. But as they got older they slowly returned. All three of my married children have been married in the church and had marriage prep with a priest and through a diocese. My two grandchildren were baptized in the church and all are regular churchgoers after several years away.

So St. Jerome’s experience of being raised in the church and having a church family to fall back on is still important and relevant for us today.

St. Jerome, pray for us!

For further reading

• St. Jerome, an Illustrated Biography
• The St. Jerome Collection