During his Roman sojourn, he became an insatiable reader of the Latin classics, studying under the most celebrated teachers of rhetoric then living.įollowing his studies, he undertook a long journey through Gaul, which brought him to the imperial city of Trier, now in Germany. As was the custom in those times, he was baptized as an adult sometime between 358 and 364, while studying rhetoric in Rome. Born around 345 in Stridon, on the border between Dalmatia and Pannonia, in present-day Croatia and Slovenia, he received a solid upbringing in a Christian family. The journey of Saint Jerome’s life traversed the roads of the Roman Empire between Europe and the East.

Indeed, as a sure guide and authoritative witness, Jerome in some sense dominated both the XII Assembly of the Synod of Bishops devoted to the Word of God, and the Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Dominiof my predecessor Benedict XVI, published on the feast day of the Saint, 30 September 2010. Now on the 1600th anniversary of his death, I too desire to commemorate Saint Jerome and to emphasize once more the timeliness of his message and teachings, beginning with his immense love for the Scriptures. More recently, Benedict XVI devoted two successive catecheses to his person and works. A century ago, on the fifteenth centenary of his death, Benedict XV dedicated his Encyclical Letter Spiritus Paraclitus (15 September 1920) to Jerome, presenting him to the world as “doctor maximus explanandis Scripturis”. My predecessors have honoured Saint Jerome on various occasions. The Christian iconographic tradition presents him, in the company of Augustine, Ambrose and Gregory the Great, as one of the four great Doctors of the Western Church. In the East, he knew Gregory of Nazianzus, Didymus the Blind and Epiphanius of Salamis. A youthful friend of Rufinus of Aquileia, he knew Ambrose and was frequently in correspondence with Augustine. He served as a bridge between East and West. Thus, in the pursuit of knowledge that marked his entire life, he put to good use his youthful studies and Roman education, redirecting his scholarship to the greater service of God and the ecclesial community.Īs a result, Saint Jerome became one of the great figures of the ancient Church in the period known as the golden age of patristics. It gave his life a new and more decisive orientation: he was to become a servant of the word of God, in love, as it were, with the “flesh of Scripture”. That experience inspired Jerome to devote himself entirely to Christ and his word, and to strive through his translations and commentaries to make the divine writings increasingly accessible to others. Jerome had loved from his youth the limpid beauty of the Latin classics, whereas the writings of the Bible had initially struck him as uncouth and ungrammatical, too harsh for his refined literary taste. But the Judge retorted: ‘You lie! You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian’”. As he himself recalled: “Questioned about my state, I responded that I was a Christian. That dream proved to be a decisive turning point in his life, an occasion of conversion and change in outlook. He thus entrusted himself to the Lord whom he had always sought and known in the Scriptures, the same Lord whom, as a Judge, he had already encountered in a feverish dream, possibly during the Lenten season of 375.

On 30 September 420, Saint Jerome died in Bethlehem, in the community that he had founded near the grotto of the Nativity. Jerome’s profound knowledge of the Scriptures, his zeal for making their teaching known, his skill as an interpreter of texts, his ardent and at times impetuous defence of Christian truth, his asceticism and harsh eremitical discipline, his expertise as a generous and sensitive spiritual guide – all these make him, sixteen centuries after his death, a figure of enduring relevance for us, the Christians of the twenty-first century. That “living and tender love” flowed, like a great river feeding countless streams, into his tireless activity as a scholar, translator and exegete. Now, on the sixteen hundredth anniversary of his death, those words taken from the opening prayer of his liturgical Memorial give us an essential insight into this outstanding figure in the Church’s history and his immense love for Christ. Devotion to sacred Scripture, a “living and tender love” for the written word of God: this is the legacy that Saint Jerome bequeathed to the Church by his life and labours.

Et affectus english translation