Homily for Memorial of St. Jerome

Homily for the Memorial of St. Jerome

Sept. 30, 2021
Collect
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Home, New Rochelle, N.Y.

“O God … grant that your people may be ever more fruitfully nourished by your Word and find in it the fount of life” (Collect).

(Church of the Madeleine)

Jerome wasn’t always a fan of the Scriptures.  Instead, he was enamored of classical Latin and Greek literature.  It’s reported that as a young man he didn’t think much of the Greek style of the New Testament.

Then one nite he had a dream in which Christ appeared to him and chastised him:  “You’re not a Christian.  You’re a Ciceronian.”

He took that to heart, all the more when Pope Damasus charged him to translate the entire Bible into good, understandable Latin (the Latin of the vulgus, the common people).  He learned Hebrew for that purpose.  He came to love God’s Word; like the Jews who listened to Ezra the scribe (Neh 8:1-12), he found joy in the sacred Word (cf. Ps 19). He spent 30 years translating, studying, and teaching it.  He relocated to Bethlehem, partly to escape his enemies in Rome—his sharp tongue earned him more than a few—and partly to add knowledge of the land where Christ had lived to his understanding of the Bible.

Jerome wrote:  “The person who doesn’t know Scriptures doesn’t know the power and wisdom of God.  Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ” (LOH 4:1448).

So the Church wants all of us to “be ever more fruitfully nourished” by God’s Word—“Word” meaning both the sacred writings and the incarnate Word who speaks to us thru those writings.  That we might be better nourished, Vatican II ordered the expansion of our Scripture readings at Mass and the other sacraments.  You may remember that there was only 1 cycle of 2 Sunday readings, and we used to hear the same Sunday readings all thru the following week.  Further, we’ve been vigorously encouraged to read and reflect on the Bible regularly on our own, especially the Gospels and St. Paul.

For us as for St. Jerome, encountering Christ and absorbing his Word makes us Christians.  He is the fount of life.