Saint Jerome

Priest and Doctor of the Church

Feast Day

September 30

Life

347–420

Doctor of the Church

1295

Born

Stridon, Dalmatia

Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus was born about 347 at Stridon, on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia. Educated at Rome under the grammarian Donatus, he was baptized as an adult around 366. After travels to Trier and a period of strict ascetic life in the Syrian desert of Chalcis, where he learned Hebrew, he was ordained priest at Antioch and served briefly as secretary to Pope Damasus I at Rome (382-385).

It was Damasus who commissioned him to revise the Old Latin versions of the Bible against the original Greek and Hebrew texts. The work, completed at Bethlehem, became the Vulgate, the standard Latin Bible of the Western Church for sixteen centuries, declared at the Council of Trent (1546) the authentic edition for public use. He produced commentaries on most books of the Bible, the De viris illustribus (a literary history of Christian writers), translations of Origen and Eusebius, and a vast correspondence containing some of the most lapidary prose in Christian Latin.

From 386 he lived at Bethlehem in a monastery near the Cave of the Nativity, with parallel houses for women under his collaborator Saint Paula. There he wrote, taught, and engaged in fierce polemics against Helvidius, Jovinian, Pelagius and Origen's later admirers. He died at Bethlehem on 30 September 420 and was buried near the Cave; his relics were translated in the thirteenth century to the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome. Boniface VIII declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1295.