Deepertruth: Stand In The Gap With Us And Saint Jerome

Stand In The Gap With Us And Saint Jerome 9/30/2023

Jerome is the second-most voluminous writer – after Augustine of Hippo (354–430) – in ancient Latin Christianity. The Catholic Church recognizes him as the patron saint of translators, librarians, and encyclopedists. Jerome translated many biblical texts into Latin from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

He was an avid student, a thorough scholar, a prodigious letter-writer and a consultant to monk, bishop, and pope. Saint Augustine said of him, “What Jerome is ignorant of, no mortal has ever known.” Saint Jerome is particularly important for having made a translation of the Bible which came to be called the Vulgate.

'Til your good is better and your better is best". The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.

Jerome firmly insists that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. A strong exhortation from a Father and Doctor of the Catholic Church to Christians urging all to recognize that serious Bible study is a necessity, not an optional luxury.

Saint Jerome has a vigorous sense of active virtue, he aims to modify reality with tenacity, he wants a spiritual rebirth, as a rebirth had happened in the field of letters and arts, he desires the reform of the Church and he works for it, resuming not so much the pagan culture, but the perennial source of the Gospel

Legend says that the saint once removed a thorn from the paw of a lion, which then became his permanent companion. The lion lying protectively in the foreground of the sunlit room represents the taming of human passions.

In portrayals of St. Jerome and other saints, the skull symbolizes our mortality. Memento mori —the memory of death—is something we as Christians should always have in our minds, though not for the sake of meaningless morbidity.